Possession, Power and the New Age (Theology and Religion in Interdisciplinary Perspective)

POSSESSION, POWER AND THE NEW AGE This book provides a new sociological account of contemporary religious phenomena such as channelling, holistic healing, meditation and divination, which are usually classed as part of a New Age Movement. Drawing on his extensive ethnography carried out in the UK, alongside comparative studies in America and Europe, Matthew Wood criticises the view that such phenomena represent spirituality in which self-authority is paramount. Instead, he emphasises the role of social authority and the centrality of spirit possession, linking these to participants’ class positions and experiences of secularisation. Informed by sociological and anthropological approaches to social power and practice, especially the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, Wood’s study explores what he calls the nonformative regions of the religious field, and charts similarities and differences with pagan, spiritualist and Theosophical traditions.

THEOLOGY AND RELIGION IN INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE SERIES Series Editors Professor Douglas Davies, University of Durham, UK Professor Richard Fenn, Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, USA

Creativity through shared perspectives lies at the heart of Ashgate’s series Theology and Religion in Interdisciplinary Perspective. Central religious and theological topics can be raised to a higher order of expression and clarity when approached through interdisciplinary perspectives; this series aims to provide a pool of potential theories and worked out examples as a resource for ongoing debate, fostering intellectual curiosity rather than guarding traditional academic boundaries and extending, rather than acting as a simple guide to, an already well-defined field. Major theological issues of contemporary society and thought, as well as some long established ideas, are explored in terms of current research across appropriate disciplines and with an international compass. The books in the series will prove of particular value to students, academics, and others who see the benefit to be derived from bringing together ideas and information that often exist in relative isolation. Also in the series Christ and Human Rights The Transformative Engagement George Newlands 978-0-7546-5201-4 (HBK) 978-0-7546-5210-6 (PBK) Christian Language and its Mutations Essays in Sociological Understanding David Martin 978-0-7546-0739-7 (HBK) 978-0-7546-0740-3 (PBK) The Return of the Primitive A New Sociological Theory of Religion Richard K. Fenn 978-0-7546-0419-8 (HBK) 978-0-7546-0420-4 (PBK)

Possession, Power and the New Age Ambiguities of Authority in Neoliberal Societies

MATTHEW WOOD Queen’s University Belfast, UK

© Matthew Wood 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Matthew Wood has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wood, Matthew Possession, power and the New Age : ambiguities of authority in neoliberal societies. – (Theology and religion in interdisciplinary perspective) 1. Authority – Religious aspects – New Age movement 2. New Age movement I. Title 299.9'3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wood, Matthew, 1970– Possession, power, and the New Age : ambiguities of authority in neoliberal societies / Matthew Wood. p. cm. – (Theology and religion in interdisciplinary perspective series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-3339-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. New Age movement. 2. Spirit possession. I. Title. BP605.N48W66 2007 306.6'9993–dc22 2006022503 ISBN 978-0-7546-3339-6

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

To my parents, Eileen and David Wood

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

1

Approaching New Age

1

2

The field of New Age studies

15

3

Power, self and practice

41

4

The meditation group

79

5

Channelling workshops

101

6

The Nottinghamshire fair

121

7

Spiritualism and paganism

137

8

Nonformativeness, possession and class in neoliberal societies

155

Bibliography Index

179 197

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Acknowledgements This book is the outcome of a long process of sociological research and reflection, during which many teachers, colleagues and students have helped me in my understanding of religion and society, sometimes in a formative manner. To begin, however, I must express my deep gratitude to those people who welcomed me into their groups to conduct fieldwork, and who gave their time in conversations and interviews, whether over a cup of tea, a pint or a notebook. Their openness and companionship is greatly appreciated. I am most grateful to the University of Nottingham for funding my doctoral research through a Postgraduate Studentship. My foremost academic debt is to Douglas Davies, whose undergraduate teaching and postgraduate supervision in the Department of Theology at the University of Nottingham enthused in me a sense of the power of sociological and anthropological thinking. His care and understanding during my illness, when it often seemed as if my research was standing still, is hugely appreciated. I was very fortunate to be taught the philosophy of religion by John Heywood Thomas, whose lively academic interest was infectious, and to have pursued my study when Amy Simes was conducting her own doctoral research into paganism in the same department, and whose continuing friendship I greatly value. I also benefitted during this time by being able to spend two fruitful months amongst many interesting colleagues in the Sociology of Religion department at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, through funding by a European Union Erasmus grant. Since completing my doctoral studies, I have had the good luck to work with many intellectually stimulating and companionable colleagues. John Eade and Cecilia Cappel at Roehampton University proved invaluable in helping me broaden my focus towards issues of ethnicity and globalization. Alex Seago at Richmond the American International University in London offered generous support and encouragement in my first teaching post. I am very grateful to have worked with colleagues in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, especially Patrick Baert and Shireen Kanji, and David Lehmann who it has been a pleasure to teach alongside and whose warmth is much appreciated. The last stages of writing this book were aided by challenging conversations with students at Cambridge taking the undergraduate Religion and Politics paper and the M.Phil. in Modern Society and Global Transformations. I am especially thankful to Chris Bunn and Hettie Malcomson, SPS graduate students who read through draft chapters and provided many useful comments. Elsewhere, I have benefited from discussions with Véronique Altglas, Khezer Ameripour, Dave Beris, Julian Gibbs, Ian Hibberson, Seth Kunin, Andrew Mathers, Freda Mold, Steven Sutcliffe, Howard Taylor and John Walliss. I am very thankful to Daiga Kamerāde for her support and for allowing me to use her splendidly ambiguous photograph for the cover of this book. I am further indebted to Douglas Davies and equally to Richard Fenn, as series editors, for their

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incisive and invaluable comments on draft chapters, which have greatly improved this book’s argumentation and structure, and for their continued encouragement. I am very thankful to Sarah Lloyd at Ashgate for her steadfast support and patience, especially in the face of repeated delays. None of these is responsible for any failings in this book. Lastly, I must extend my thanks to my family for all the love and support they have shown me. To my grandmother Norah Hanger for our lively discussions. To my siblings, Jim, Sarah and Duncan, and their families, for providing welcome solace when I needed to get away from it all. When they finally get around to reading this book, they may at last realise that I have worked on something other than Kierkegaard. Most of all, I must express my love and gratitude to my parents who have always been there for me, and to whom this book is dedicated.

Chapter One

Approaching New Age A cameo ‘Fire!’ shouted the woman opposite me. ‘Red!’ I shouted back. I was not ignoring an announcement of impending incendiary catastrophe, however, but playing a game with her. We were sat facing each other in a bare hall in a small town in Nottinghamshire, a county in the English East Midlands, in 1993. Like the other fifty people in the room, we had been instructed to find a person we did not know, sit opposite them, and say, in turn, whatever word came into our heads, trying each time to speak louder than our partner. I had felt self-conscious, especially as my partner, a woman who looked to be in her late thirties or early forties, insisted I go first. There was not much noise in the room – it seemed as if most people were having as much trouble as I in thinking of a word. Afterwards, in the evening as I wrote up my fieldnotes at home, I remember cringing when I recalled my first word, which was simply what I saw when I looked over my partner’s shoulder. It hardly seemed fitting as a word that ‘higher realms’ would have placed into my mind, as Sheila Patterson, the leader of the event, had said would happen. ‘Window’, I spoke, not daring to say it louder. My partner looked quizzically at me and then smirked. I knew she was having as much trouble in speaking as me. After a few seconds, during which time – I admit – I stared at her, as if challenging her word to be more attuned to the theme of the day than mine, she said, in a voice not much louder than mine, ‘Landscape’. I reflected a moment. Her word seemed to be more spiritual, connecting with nature, and was also something that might be seen out of a window. ‘Groove’, I said, raising my voice a little. I was surprised at this and so, seemingly, was my partner, because she immediately laughed. Perhaps she was thinking of ‘groovy’, a word inextricably associated with hippies and the 1960s, the decade in which she, and many others in the room, would have spent her childhood. Born in 1970 I had missed that, spending much of my childhood instead in the Thatcherite world of yuppies. When writing up my fieldnotes, I could not remember many of the words that came next, but I know they came thick and fast, our voices becoming noisier until we were shouting them, challenging each other to say them faster and louder. The whole room now seemed to be a hubbub of noise and we had to shout to make ourselves heard. I noticed Sheila moving around the room, her eyes level and a knowing smile on her lips. Sometimes, she would bend down to interrupt a couple and talk to them. Although she did not do this to me and my partner, others I spoke to later said she was asking them what their last word had been, and commenting upon what they might mean. She also encouraged people not to be inhibited and seemed to delight in the most vociferous couples. Although this game continued for less than five minutes, it seemed much longer and by the end Sheila was clapping her hands,

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Possession, Power and the New Age

calling for us to stop. We all seemed to be having fun, though, and wanted to carry on – some couples were talking animatedly about their words and others were laughing hard. It took Sheila several minutes to restore order, but eventually we were all quiet, facing the front where she stood. She then proceeded to ask people to tell us what they had discovered in this game. Some expressed surprise at the words they had spoken and tried to explain these in terms of deeper meanings to their lives. One man, for instance, explained how, quite unexpectedly, the word ‘roof’ had come into his mind, which he interpreted as referring to the limit that for years he had placed on his ‘spiritual’ abilities by not developing them. Sheila responded that it also referred to the limit that people impose upon their ‘ascension’, out of fear for accepting their higher powers and responsibilities. The man nodded and murmured agreement. I did not speak, but my partner told the room that she had uttered the word ‘fire’ and felt a ‘deep glowing’ within her. She believed, she said, this was because she had had a lot of energy in recent weeks, feeling ‘on fire’ and ‘focused’. Sheila explained that the ‘Ascended Masters’ could set fire to our old ways of living, releasing us to do what we really wanted. This game took place in a day’s event in which Sheila, an Australian in her forties, told us about her experiences with the Ascended Masters, highly evolved beings who manage the evolution of humanity by controlling the universe’s energies. Describing herself as a ‘channeller’, Sheila was able to communicate the Masters’ discourses, as they spoke or wrote through her. More than that, however, she was able to interact with them personally and to travel throughout space and time to perform tasks they set her. Our evolution, she explained in several talks during the course of the day, involves our eventual ‘ascension’, whereby we will move to a ‘higher vibration’ or ‘dimension’ and leave the ‘physical plane’. The word game and the others we played during the day were exercises, she said, to help ‘open’ ourselves to the Masters and make it easier for us to ascend. Despite the jocular tone of the day, there was much seriousness too, with opportunities for Sheila’s audience to question her about changes in their own lives and the relevance of the Masters to those. Sheila was touring Europe and America, and although it was possible to sign up for a monthly newsletter she produced about her communications from the Masters, there was no group or society, with which she was associated, to join, even informally. Julie and Andrew Spencer, who hosted a fortnightly meditation group that I had recently begun to attend, had organized this event. The Spencers organized day events for other channellers too, but had no formal attachments to any, although they frequently articulated their views. I start with this cameo because scholars see channelling as typically, sometimes archetypically, New Age. Many scholars would also view the sort of meditation group I researched, its attenders and their activities as part of the New Age, which they see as a diverse collection of practices, beliefs and ideologies that has arisen in recent decades principally in Euro-America.1 This diversity is seen, however, as bearing a strong common theme that leads most scholars to speak of the New Age as a movement: the primacy of self-authority. The New Age is seen as a religion – or, more usually, a spirituality – in which people choose what to do, and how to do it, on the basis of their own authority, rather than being directed by authorities external to them. External authorities and traditions are utilized, through marketplace

Approaching New Age

3

consumption, merely as resources from which the self draws. Scholars see this situation as reflected in the discourse of the New Age, which extols the self, its fulfilment and expression, such that these authorities act to encourage and facilitate people’s expressions of their own authority. In fact, in recent years, scholars have viewed the New Age as designating a monumental shift away from traditional religions, in which external authorities muffle the self, and towards self-authoritative spirituality. This opening cameo indicates a quite different interpretation. The authority of the channeller, Sheila, is clear enough. Her audience spent a whole day listening to her experiences of working with the Masters, including carrying out important and dangerous duties for them, and the authoritative communications they brought to us through her. In addition, she directed us in exercises designed to enable us to communicate more openly with the Masters, and advised us in how to interpret our life experiences in terms of their ideas and actions. Thus, whilst placing much emphasis upon the requirement for us to look within ourselves for knowledge and confirmation, as in the game in which significant words arose unwittingly into our mouths, Sheila did this specifically by emphasizing the authority of the Masters, their communications and actions on our behalf, and of herself, who carries out their will and works in tandem with them. Her interruptions, interpretations, descriptions, communications and explanations intertwined with our learning of these techniques and discourses of self-exploration and self-expression. Other authorities were also present, such as the Spencers who had invited Sheila, who knew many in the audience well, and who often spoke about her (and other channellers’) ideas at the meditation group. These authorities cannot be brushed aside as mere resources, between which each individual picks and chooses without surrendering an essential self-authority, or through which they learn the ability to value and express such self-authority. They strongly affected people’s experiences during the day, remaining afterwards as ways they thought about themselves and their lives, not only in terms of the ideas or beliefs they had heard, but also in terms of ethos and emotions. In the following months and years, I had much opportunity to see how people had been affected by this event as well as by other channelling events, by group participation in activities such as the meditation, and by being taught techniques such as those for healing and divination. In sum, the people I researched were affected by numerous authorities, their lives becoming entwined with these in complex and subtle ways. The idea of separating their self-authority from these authorities, of seeing the former taking primacy over the latter, seems as false as viewing these people as moulded by such authorities as if they were inert lumps of clay. This book is a refutation of the scholarly discourse about the New Age and selfauthority, but also a consideration of how social phenomena classified under this label should be understood. It attempts to grasp more realistically the manner in which authorities are enfolded into the self, that is, into the ways in which people are socially subjectified and come to understand themselves. This is a dynamic process that requires a dynamic methodology, one that seeks to situate individuals and groups in the diversity and history of their practices. Focusing upon a number of these in Nottinghamshire over several years, I show that they are characterized by

4

Possession, Power and the New Age

multiple authorities, none of which are formative in shaping them, but all of which contribute in so doing. This proliferation of what I call nonformative authorities has been almost entirely neglected by the sociology of religion. The Nottinghamshire network Groups and interconnections Nottinghamshire is a mixture of small towns and rural villages, dominated until recently by the coal mining industry, and Nottingham, a city with a population of around a quarter of a million people which with its thriving shopping and night scenes acts as a central pull for the rest of the county, as well as for the inhabitants of bordering counties Derbyshire and Lincolnshire. From 1992 to 1994 and again in 1996, I researched ethnographically a number of groups in this county, and occasionally further afield in England, which formed part of what I somewhat arbitrarily designate the ‘Nottinghamshire network’. Figure 1, provides a schematic representation of this network: groups studied, selected participants, key informants, and connections between people and groups. This intention was to conduct an ethnographic study of the New Age in Britain, but I soon began to question my original perspective. Although the religious groups and practices I researched were of the sort described in the scholarly literature as New Age, also falling into descriptions of alternative or non-mainstream religion, the interpretations developed through these perspectives were at significant variance with what I discovered in the field. In this chapter, I sketch my object of study and my theoretical orientations for interpreting the network.2 The structure of the book is also outlined, chapter by chapter. The social phenomena I studied may be viewed in two ways. The first focus falls on the different groups and events, which may be seen as discrete entities with their own histories, social organizational and authority structures, beliefs and practices. The second focus is on the interconnections between the individuals, groups and events as a whole, since there was a large degree of crossover between them in terms of people, practices and beliefs. Regarding the first focus, the longest period of fieldwork (18 months) was conducted with a meditation group styled around a representation of the teachings of the ancient Jewish sect of the Essenes. This group met fortnightly with around fifteen participants practising a meditation led by one or two of their number, before spending the rest of the evening socializing. Only half the attenders were regularly attending members, the rest coming from a wider pool of interested people. Important informants at the group were two couples in their forties, the Lovells, who directed the meditation and had founded the group, and the Spencers, in whose house it was held, and four younger people: Christine, Sally, Beth and Noel. The Spencers occasionally organized events in which channellers, such as Sheila Patterson, conducted workshops. These attracted around fifty people, including several from the meditation group, although not the Lovells who, like many in the network, were sceptical of channellers. These names, like all others including those for groups, are pseudonyms. Exact quotes from field subjects are placed in quotation marks.

Approaching New Age

5

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Figure 1 The Nottinghamshire network This figure shows groups studied with selected participants. Names in bold indicate key informants and lines between individuals indicate marriage or partnership

6

Possession, Power and the New Age

Before my research began, I had no experience or contact with this group or any others like it. I learnt about the meditation group through Anne, an older retired woman, whilst attending an Anthroposophical group for four months. I had originally identified this group as an easy way into researching the New Age, since scholars linked this to Anthroposophy, and it was simple to identify a local group because they publicly advertised their meetings. Whilst at the meditation group, I also made contact, again through Anne, with an occult study group, which I also spent four months researching. The Anthroposophy group’s fortnightly meetings combined meditation with discussions based upon readings of Rudolf Steiner’s books, which, during my time there, looked at his idea of ‘spiritual science’, in which an understanding of human evolution and being enables an understanding of human potential and development. At least a dozen people attended, with half of these being regular attenders. The occult study group’s fortnightly meetings were based around a talk, followed by discussion and socializing. Topics varied widely: from astrology to the ideas of David Icke, and from the significance of Egyptian pyramids to occult activities in the Third Reich. Practitioners of a wide range of pagan and occult practices and groups attended these meetings, including witches, astrologers and those interested in Aleister Crowley’s teachings. Martin, a man in his thirties who established and ran the group, gave two-thirds of the talks and was interested in most of these different traditions. This fieldwork took place from winter 1992 to autumn 1994, at which time my research was interrupted due to ill health. I resumed fieldwork for six months in 1996, after being introduced to a friend’s work colleague, Michelle, who had a fascinating biography of religious practice that included many practices common in the groups I had already studied. Michelle knew several of the people I had already researched and told me about a religious fair that had been started about a year earlier. This was held monthly on Sundays in a town centre hotel, attracting around one hundred and fifty people who paid to attend workshops and lectures and to browse the twenty or so stalls that offered services, information and goods. Activities at the fair included spiritualism, healing practices and religious traditions such as Buddhism, and amongst the speakers and stall-holders were Christine, Sally and Noel from the meditation group. Its initiator and organizer, Michael, a friend of Michelle’s, practised crystal healing and had a history of experience involving shamanism, channelling and Reiki (a form of healing by which an initiate acts as a channel for a universal energy force). Alvin, a spiritualist healer, held a stall at the fair and it was through him that I researched a spiritualist healing circle, which he ran with his wife and another man, all of them in their fifties or sixties. Alongside these often over-lapping periods of fieldwork with groups, research also involved attendance at other events, leading to meetings with people who had only sporadic social connections within the network. As well as the channelling workshops, such events and meetings included fieldwork with Charles, a Londoner in his thirties who had attended one of the channelling workshop the Spencers had organized and with who I attended the London Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit in 1994; participation in Reiki healing sessions with Sally, Noel and Beth; an interview with the manager of a local holistic health centre; attending with Alvin a religious fair in Derbyshire;

Approaching New Age

7

participation in one of Michael’s crystal healing workshops; and attending various occult and pagan meetings with people from the occult study group. This focus on groups and events needs to be complemented with a focus on interconnections. This constitutes the second way of understanding the network: not as a static structure of fixed points, but as a dynamic process of interchanges of information and personnel, relying heavily on socializing. As such, the groups and events that may be thought of as fixed points in the network were themselves in flux, being open to the introduction of different and often challenging ideas, practices and people. Whilst some, such as the Anthroposophical group, were more resistant to these because of their more organized nature, others, such as the meditation group, could be significantly transformed, as its history showed. Interviews conducted with key informants consolidated this focus by demonstrating the network of interrelations between groups. An understanding of this crossover requires a perspective that moves beyond a consideration of each group or event as it was in itself and hence the notion of a network is employed. By referring to my object of study as a network, I am therefore drawing attention to the considerable flows in people, practices and beliefs between a number of different groups and events within a relatively limited geographical area. The intensity and persistence of these flows indicated that what I was investigating could be usefully designated as a network, although this should not imply that those involved referred to the social space of their religious practices in such a manner, for they did not. Indeed, most did not conceptualize this social space at all, despite showing great interest in what was going on across it. Furthermore, the variation in the intensity and persistence of these flows demonstrated that some people and groups were more closely tied together than others and could thus be described as existing towards the core, rather than the periphery, of the network, in terms of clusters of interconnections rather than the delineation of a bounded entity. As well as the groups researched, I learned of a number of other groups and events that could be located in the network, such as an astrology group, a group studying the writings of the occultist Gurdjieff, a group named Hundredth Monkeying!, a cancer care group run by the Spencers, meetings for a small number of young men run by the spiritualist healer Alvin, and a number of other local religious fairs and healing centres. Methodological considerations The methodology employed in studying this network is based upon anthropological and sociological traditions of ethnography to pursue a contextualized interpretation. As the more recent history of these traditions has shown, it is essential also to contextualize the researcher within ethnographic practice. As already indicated, my initial contact and subsequent associations in the field had little clear direction, often being the result of arbitrary meetings and acquaintances, so it is important to situate myself in relation to people and events. This reflexive approach provides insight into how my experience of conducting ethnographic research informed my relations in the field and thus my interpretation of what people were doing, how and why they were doing it, and how they understood what they doing. Although I sought to gain an understanding of the world as seen from field subjects’ perspectives, it was

8

Possession, Power and the New Age

important also to maintain a critical stance towards those perspectives so that their location in social conditions could be reflected upon, rather than adopting them as a natural way of looking at the world. Indeed, this is one of the most problematic features of New Age studies, for they almost invariably adopt what may be described as insiders’ perspectives in place of scholarly understanding based upon a critical interpretation of these. Worse, the insiders’ perspectives that are adopted are generally those of published authors, who, in the context of publishers’ categorizations of a genre named ‘New Age’, typically proclaim themselves to be ‘New Agers’ and to represent a ‘New Age Movement’. In pursuit of a more critical stance, my approach not only problematizes the models constructed by field subjects and the authors they read, but also requires reflection upon scholarly interpretative frameworks, that is, the theories and concepts I applied to the field. By drawing out these points in the text, the aim is to gain a better understanding of the research process, to see it in terms of its vicissitudes and constructions, rather than as the implementation of a blueprint that mechanically produces results through disembodied practice. My ethnography also involved in-depth interviews with 14 key informants in the network, primarily to construct their life histories and histories of religious experience. These were conducted after I had established a rapport with them through participant observation. The manner in which my ethnography was carried out involved not merely attendance at group meetings and other events I deemed significant, but the establishment of good relations with participants so that I could socialize with them on a broader basis. This was helped by the easy-going nature of social relationships that existed in most of the groups, which extended me a ready welcome. The relationships I established meant that I was able to visit many participants in their homes for chats during the day and evening, and to go out with some to the pub or parties. Through the forging of such friendships, I was able to deflect my attention on their religious activities towards a wider knowledge and understanding of their lives, including their backgrounds, work and family lives. Not all my relationships with field subjects were easy. A few appeared to distrust my motivations or resent my presence, yet this also enabled me to gain insights such as the differing views present within groups. The primary literature I was reading is also relevant to discuss here. This reading took two forms. On the one hand, there was literature that people in the network were reading or had read, including published books and magazines as well as leaflets and unpublished manuscripts. Most of this material was borrowed from field subjects, and would often form the basis for discussions with them. On the other hand, to bring a comparative dimension into the research, I also studied literature written by those involved with other social phenomena considered by scholars as part of the New Age, such as the Findhorn community in Scotland. This provided me with immediate points of comparison, as well as more information to discuss with field subjects, who were sometimes aware and knowledgeable about these. However, what I sought to avoid was the assumption that just because a group or person was engaged in a particular practice, all primary literature relating to that practice was useful for understanding how it was used and interpreted in the network. Just because someone practised Reiki, for example, did not mean that it would be

Approaching New Age

9

useful for me to read any and all books and magazine articles about Reiki in order to understand their practice of it. Through this approach, I set my research against the reifications of practices and beliefs that are so common in sociological studies of religion and in New Age studies in particular, as I will show. Reiki, for example, should not be thought of as a practice and belief-system that practitioners buy into or assimilate, as if all such practitioners are doing and thinking the same thing. Rather, the practice of Reiki varies considerably in terms of how it is practised, conceived, learned and transmitted. Likewise, the actual use of the term ‘New Age’ by field subjects needs to be contextually examined, rather than assumed to refer to a common ideology or social movement. In the network, the term ‘New Age’ was used infrequently and referred to quite different things from one person to another. Indeed, the very nature of social authority and organization in the network meant that the meanings of practices and beliefs were incommensurate between even those involved in the same groups. Theoretical orientations Most scholars would identify the sorts of phenomena I researched as New Age, perhaps as part of a New Age Movement. This is not my interpretation, for the scholarly field of New Age studies is fraught with a tendency to lack theoretical underpinning, empirical evidence and comparative considerations. By pursuing detailed and longterm ethnographic study, in contrast I aim to socially contextualize these phenomena and understand them in terms of social authority and organization, that is, issues of social power. My interest is in exploring how authority and organization are constructed and maintained between people in relatively informal religious groups and relationships. These constructions in small groups and personal relationships need to be contextualized across their wider social spaces, requiring research at a number of sites. They must also be related to wider social formations and processes that provide insight into why they exist (and in such a form) in contemporary societies. This approach is rooted in the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, for which power remains a central focus. That is not to say that they do not contain competing interpretations of power, but that by explicitly addressing this concept I aim to connect with important sociological issues that are largely absent in New Age studies. However, I wish to raise an important qualification to these remarks, lest it be thought that this is an attempt to reconfigure the field and place it on a proper footing alongside other scholarly fields. A distinct academic field of New Age studies should not exist, simply because no case has been convincingly made that an area of religious belief and practice that can be described as New Age exists. Therefore, it is not the framework of New Age studies that needs to be changed, but the framework of how those phenomena classified as New Age are analysed. What needs to be altered is the scholarly perception of such phenomena, in terms of their theoretical analysis, their empirical investigation and their meaningful comparison. The framework employed in this study is therefore not one that replaces the descriptor ‘New Age’ with another term (a move that would simply shift the problem), but one that eschews any scholarly encapsulation of these phenomena, except in the sense that they can only be classified in terms of not being confinable by scholarly descriptors. It is this

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Possession, Power and the New Age

situation that the term ‘nonformative’ is coined to describe. This is not a label that replaces ‘New Age’, but a term that denies the validity of descriptors to that to which it is applied. Without further consideration, the important point to emphasize is that the present study is not an attempt to re-label so-called New Age phenomena, and therefore does not locate itself within the field of New Age studies. The phenomena considered by scholarly studies as New Age do not disappear just because such studies contain fundamental flaws. They still require sociological interpretation and by emphasizing issues of power this study draws specifically upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, both of who emphasize social practice. The central practice at the meditation group was, obviously, meditation, but I found that some in the network regularly meditated or practised visualization techniques alone. However, discussions at the meditation group showed that this was only one amongst a number of sorts of practice important in participants’s lives and of significance to their meditative practice. Healing practices also featured prominently in people’s experiences and discussions, as they did at the religious fair. Some in the network pursued this professionally; a very few, such as the Lovells and Michael, did so as their main form of income. Divinatory practices were also common: techniques using physical objects (such as Tarot cards or pendulums), or systems of thought requiring calculation (such as astrology), enabling the attainment, through their interpretation, of guidance or information. The majority of people in the network engaged with each of these three sorts of practice. Lastly, there were practices of spirit possession, primarily in the forms described by practitioners as ‘channelling’, ‘shamanism’ and ‘spiritualism’. This practice laid the ground for many people’s experiences of their other practices and beliefs, as well as appearing fundamental to the origins and establishment of many of the groups. Experience of possession came either through knowledge of others’s possession experiences or through the personal practice of possession. Possession in fact legitimated people’s other practices as religious. As I will show, an interpretation of practices of spirit possession is crucial for an understanding of the network, facilitating an understanding in terms of wider societal features. I also explore comparisons between practices in the network and practices of meditation, healing, divination and possession in other social contexts, in order to draw out distinctive features of the former. This is especially developed in the last ethnographic chapter, in which I consider the ways in which practice, authority and organization in spiritualism, Anthroposophy and paganism bear differences from these in the meditation group and religious fair. In this way, I draw a distinction between the core and periphery of the network: the latter refers to where the network is marked by the formation of common religious identities such as ‘spiritualist’, ‘Anthroposophist’ and ‘pagan’. Away from the social space of these peripheral areas and towards the core of the network, no such identity was articulated, not even that of New Age – in so far as that term was used, it was not dominant and overlapped with field subjects other descriptions of their social space, including ‘the channelling movement’ and ‘spirituality’. Although dominant ideologies and identities were absent in the network, then, it was not an empty space but full of meanings, beliefs and practices that flowed across it, rendering it problematic for scholarly theories of religion.

Approaching New Age

11

As my research into the network progressed, two issues therefore became dominant. Firstly, the manner in which there were not only multiple religious authorities in groups and individuals’s lives, but that because none was dominant they tended to relativize one another’s abilities formatively to shape experiences and identities. This meant that Bourdieuian notions of habitus and conflict, and Foucauldian notions of subjectification, were not easily applicable although they were essential for understanding the extent of this nonformativeness. Secondly, the way in which people kept becoming involved with, and kept referring to their past experiences of, practices of possession, even in a nonformative way. This suggested that they sought to legitimize their practices and lives as religious, for possession involves relationships with supernatural entities. People in the network therefore existed in a peculiar position in the religious field, valuing its capital but without becoming embroiled in its conflicts. The nonformative nature of the network meant that possession cults and careers did not develop in the standardized ways of other social contexts, but authorities involving possession, and practices related to it, proliferated in relativized ways. As anthropological studies have explored, practices of possession may be viewed as involving a dynamic of social and personal empowerment and disempowerment, which relates to the societal position of particular groups or classes. Whilst possession marks people out as special and authoritative, in that they have been chosen by a spirit to become temporarily and publicly embodied, it also temporarily denies them self-control. In the Nottinghamshire network, this could be related to another strong characteristic, namely the class position of practitioners. The majority (somewhat in distinction to those traditions on the periphery of the network) were employed in professionalized working-class occupations, such as lower managerial or administrative jobs. This professionalization of certain sections of the workingclass, resulting in part from increased access to higher education and the expansion of the service sector, catches its occupants between, on the one hand, public distinctions and statuses more associated with the middle-class, and, on the other hand, prevailing working-class conditions, such as job insecurity and (since such large numbers of workers have become professionalized) massification. Furthermore, the increasing ability of working-class women to enter the labour market of these professionalized jobs sheds light on the prominent roles they took in the Nottinghamshire network. These changes can be linked to processes of neoliberalization that have so transformed Euro-American societies since the 1970s. Studies of politics, class and selfhood have specifically pointed to the proliferation of authorities in neoliberal contexts. Since neoliberalism is a global capitalist regime, it is interesting to consider to what extent similar developments exist elsewhere. There is considerable ethnographic documentation of resurgences of practices of possession across the world, but these are overwhelmingly associated with formative religious traditions, such as Pentecostal Christianity and indigenous shamanisms, rather than nonformative contexts. What such a consideration suggests is that religious nonformativeness has developed furthest in Euro-America, primarily because of its specific history of secularization, whereas elsewhere the continued dominance of the social significance of religious organizations, identities and ideologies has meant that possession practices that resonate with changing class conditions have developed in more formative

12

Possession, Power and the New Age

religious contexts. Although worldwide it is predominantly the professionalized sections of the working-class that become involved in these religious practices and organizations (although they are often mistaken as middle-class, due to their labour statuses), in Euro-America specifically it is those who are churched (that is, brought up as religious) but lapsed who are most likely to become involved with religious networks that are relatively nonformative. Outline of chapters The structure of this book proceeds from theory to ethnography. Although the ethnographic methodology is the bedrock upon which this book is based, theory is addressed in Chapters Two and Three in order to establish the manner in which the ethnographic data is analysed, particularly in distinction from the theories and approaches employed in the field of New Age studies. This field is examined in Chapter Two, with its recurring themes drawn out to illustrate the dominant ways in which the New Age has been conceptualized. It is shown that these themes establish a hegemonic discourse that captures the social phenomena under investigation and renders them subservient to particular understandings of trends in contemporary society and religion. Chapter Three addresses the concept of social power and its application to the sociology of religion. It focuses upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, who have been instrumental in constructing sophisticated theories of power by paying attention to the way in which power is situated in practical context, to the diverse and multidimensional forms and directions it takes, and to the complex interplay between structures of domination and resistance. This theory is then used to explore weaknesses in New Age studies and to open up areas for research. It is especially these studies’ lack of attention to practices as they occur in social context that limits their understanding of the social phenomena they address, especially in terms of their notion of self-authority. I then criticize Bourdieu’s theory of fields for not paying attention to those groups and individuals disengaged from the struggle for religious capital, in a context of involvement with multiple authorities that relativize each other’s influence, a situation that characterizes the Nottinghamshire network as the ethnographic chapters explore. These ethnographic chapters are only reached nearly half way through the book because it is important to deal thoroughly with the field of New Age studies, since it has become so dominant in interpreting these phenomena, and with the sociology of power, since this has been so neglected in the sociology of religion. In carefully working through these issues, a much firmer basis for ethnographic interpretation is achieved. The ethnographic account of the Nottinghamshire network is presented in Chapters Four to Seven by focusing upon four aspects related to different sites of fieldwork. Chapter Four discusses the meditation group, with a particular focus on the four people who led it and the wider context in which meditative practice occurred. Chapter Five considers the importance that channelling held for many of the meditators. Channelling events organized by the Spencers are discussed and the centrality of possession in the network highlighted. Chapter Six focuses on the religious fair, its founder, and those individuals encountered in other parts of the

Approaching New Age

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network that attended or held stalls there. The fair is seen as an important organization in the network alongside the meditation group, and a consideration of its social structures enables a more contextual understanding of authority to be established. Chapter Seven then focuses on those relatively more formative groups that lay on the periphery of the network: the spiritualist healing circle, the Anthroposophical group and the occult study group. Representing more formative traditions of spiritualism, Theosophy and paganism, there are a number of important differences and similarities between these groups and the meditation group and religious fair. Throughout these chapters, theories of power are applied to the establishment and development of structures of social organization and social authority prevalent in the network in general, and the effects of these on individuals in particular. Thus, attention is paid to people’s life histories, including not only their religious experiences but also their social backgrounds, working lives and family situations. Chapter Eight consolidates the findings of the ethnographic chapters and extends this towards a comparative understanding of related religious phenomena. Firstly, the concept of nonformativeness and the formative-nonformative tension in the network is theoretically developed. Secondly, the centrality of possession in the Nottinghamshire network is investigated in terms of the status ambiguity of those involved, linked to the changing labour conditions of certain sections of the working-class resulting from neoliberalization. This enables a comparative analysis to be developed in terms of secularization by focusing upon resurgent practices of spirit possession outside Euro-America, such as Pentecostalism and indigenous shamanisms. In this way, the religious field is further contextualized within the field of power. To conclude, this book sets out to challenge the orthodox understanding of a range of contemporary Euro-American religious phenomena that has been established by a diverse range of discourses, including those produced by scholars. But it also attempts to build on this criticism to understand why and how these phenomena exist and to relate them to other religious developments. Consequently, the arguments in this book move back and forth between theory and methodology. Together with comparison, these remain an inseparable triad through which convincing arguments within the sociological study of religion need to be forged. Notes 1 I use ‘Euro-America’ as a convenient term to refer to Western European and North American societies, which form the locus of the majority of religious and social studies I draw upon. However, the term is to be understood loosely, since similar features of these societies are also found elsewhere, as I will explore in discussions of neoliberalization. 2 Given that this chapter is an overview, I omit references to literature: these can be found in full where each topic is addressed in detail in later chapters.

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Chapter Two

The field of New Age studies Embarking upon a study of ‘the New Age in Britain’ for my doctoral research, I received a number of enlightening responses from university colleagues. An Anglican chaplain conducting research in my department asked me to give a talk on the New Age to those training for the Anglican ministry at a local theological college. This would enable them, he said, to defend the church from it. A member of staff suggested I direct my thesis as a refutation of New Age ideas. Common to these and other responses to my research was the idea that the New Age was a phenomenon that needed to be tackled. Yet from the earliest stages of my fieldwork this seemed far from clear to me: there did not seem to be a phenomenon that could be called, or that called itself, the New Age. Instead, these responses suggested to me the existence of a widely shared discourse on the New Age that said more about the positions of those making them than about those phenomena so classified. In this chapter, I examine the development of this discourse in the social sciences, with references, where appropriate, to other disciplines such as religious studies. A field of New Age studies emerged in academic disciplines from the mid-1990s and has now fed through into a large number of debates and perspectives on religion in the contemporary world. Firstly, I briefly discuss the existence of a broader discourse on the New Age across a number of social factions, including mainstream religions, new religious movements, governments and the media. The academic field of New Age studies exists as part of this broader field, significantly interacting with these other elements. Secondly, I compare four accounts selected in terms of originality. Thirdly, I discuss how various perspectives have been taken up in broader debates about religion by sociologists of religion. Primarily concerned with dissecting the uses of the term ‘New Age’ as a motif in the sociology of religion, this chapter concludes by highlighting a number of crucial methodological and theoretical difficulties that can only be addressed by paying much greater attention to power, the subject of the next chapter. The broader field Sutcliffe (2003a) has described how scholars began to address a ‘diffuse collectivity’ of social phenomena in the 1990s through indiscriminate use of the term ‘New Age’, and has questioned this through the Foucauldian approach of exposing the genealogy of the term amongst such phenomena. It is also important to recognize that academics were responding to a broader societal field of discourse about the New Age. Indeed, a major difficulty in studying social phenomena that have been classed as New Age is that the 1980s saw debates about the New Age become part

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Possession, Power and the New Age

of Euro-American identity politics. Debates commonly referred to a number of authors characterized (either by themselves or by protagonists in these debates) as representatives of the New Age. These authors included William Bloom, Louise L. Hay, David Spangler and the celebrity-actress Shirley MacLaine. But there was also reference to practices, especially channelling and healing techniques, and to groups (or those deemed to cohere as groups), such as communities in Findhorn (in northern Scotland), Glastonbury (in south-west England) and Sedona (Arizona), and New Age travellers. As an emic concept, the term ‘New Age’ is used in some of these Euro-American communities, centres, commercial enterprises and publications (for an early account, see Nordquist, 1978, pp. 14, 21, 24 n. 3), sometimes as a key concept but more often not. The adoption of this concept as an etic label since the 1980s marks the way in which a wide variety of social factions have referred to the New Age in order to sharpen their own identities and agendas. Feeding off each other, these debates from differing social positions have resulted in the formation of a shared discourse about the existence and challenge of the New Age. This broader field (including scholars) therefore warrants genealogical exploration. Although I do not attempt that here, it is important to indicate some references to the New Age across this field. Focusing on Britain, I will show how the positing of the New Age establishes discursive dominance in interpreting the social phenomena to which it is applied, in the manner described by Foucault (2002) in his study of the constitution of knowledge and truth. Although I will limit myself to publications, a proper consideration of this broader field would require discussion of the practical and institutional elements of the genealogy of this discourse, such as the functioning of workshops, study groups and public debates. Some light on this practical dimension of the field can be shed, however, by the following. In 1994 I attended an ‘Exploring Faith’ event organized by the Dominicans on ‘New Age Spiritualities: Friend or Foe?’, led by Fr Richard Woods, OP (see also Woods, 1993). This day event, attended by 16 people with an average age of around fifty , two-thirds of whom were women, consisted of a series of lectures by Woods explaining the Christian origins of the New Age and its role as a millenarian movement that attempted to ‘cleanse’ the church from secularization. In response to a question whether there was anything to fear from the ‘New Age movement’, asked during the discussion period that ended the day, Woods answered that there was in the sense that the New Age could be too uncritically syncretistic, but the very meaning of ‘Catholicism’ means that the church was ‘big enough’ to take in everything ‘not opposed to Christian faith’. My chats with the attenders, several of who were Catholic nuns, showed considerable enthusiasm for the mystical practices that Woods identified as influential upon the New Age. This event suggests that Christian critiques of the New Age have proliferated in a context of defending, and through that defining, doctrine and practice at a time of perceived threats to Christianity by a pluralistic religious marketplace and the unchurching of populations. These critiques take either a liberal or evangelical stance, each describing the New Age in terms of a challenge to their own positions.1 Liberal approaches (as in the Dominicans event) are favourable towards the movement’s epistemological intentions, seen as a response to religious authoritarianism, but commonly criticize these as ineffectual because of their irrationality and lack of

The field of New Age studies

17

discipline (as in Drane, 1991). Whilst liberals advocate a dialogue with the New Age, evangelicals view it more as a direct, evil threat: it is seen as a pervasive and conspiratorial influence perverting an understanding of true Christianity and is thus to be feared and countered (see Hexham, 1992 and, on the Alpha course, Hunt, 2004, pp. 137–40). As a clarion call for the revitalization of moral responsibilities, reference to the New Age enables different Christian wings to define their normative boundaries and contents. The same is also true for other religious movements. Monica Sjöö (1992), a pagan, criticizes the New Age for its patriarchal bias, whilst British Buddhists attempt to widen their constituency by emphasizing similarities with the New Age but also the superior benefits of their disciplined practice (see Cush, 1996). Similarly, some groups representing indigenous peoples have identified New Agers as exploitative assimilators of practices and beliefs they deem as part of their culture (Brown, 2003). Proponents of scientific rationalism have also defended their position by identifying and castigating New Age thought (see Hess, 1993, and some contributions to Basil, 1988). Official political involvement in this discourse is less common, although the British Prime Minister John Major’s castigation of ‘New Age travellers’ at the 1992 Conservative Party conference is an infamous example: ‘Not in this age, not in any age’.2 Major’s statement reflected the rise of a popular political discourse in the 1980s, in which those who had taken to the road were viewed as rejecting social authority yet parasitic upon society, provoking considerable outcry and legislation (see Hetherington, 2000, pp. 6-13). These travellers were conceived as the youthful wing of the wider New Age, itself seen as unregulated and undisciplined religion; here, the movement represents fresh evidence of contemporary society’s narcissism (Lasch, 1987). Barker (1989) has discussed how the British State and Church of England seek to control and discriminate against new religions through indirect means, including the mass media. These religious and political constructions and legitimations of a discourse about the New Age should therefore be seen as symbiotic with those in the mass media. In broadsheet and weekly newspapers, the movement has been consistently denounced as irrational,3 cultic4 and dangerous.5 At best it is seen as involving boring nerds;6 at worst as ideologically fascist.7 Alongside these critical discourses exist more sympathetic ones. The New Age has received more positive appraisal through the focus on health and wellbeing in the lifestyle sections and supplements of broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, in which alternative and holistic therapies are frequently discussed. The movement was examined in two series on British television’s Channel Four in the 1990s, with accompanying books: The New Age (Bloom, 1991) and Far Out: The Dawning of New Age Britain (Akhtar and Humphries, 1999). This corresponds to proliferation of the New Age label in the marketing of books, magazines and music. Berman (1988, p. 255), for example, sees New Age music as a marketing term rather than a distinct musical category, stating that ‘The musical ground covered by the term New Age is therefore wide open.’ These discourses share with more critical ones the imposition of a unitary explanation and description upon a wide variety of phenomena, such as in Bloom’s (1991, p. xiv) identification of an ‘inward spiritual quest’. Thus, despite

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Possession, Power and the New Age

the differing institutional perspectives involved, there has solidified a discursive field on the existence of the New Age and the challenge (positive or negative) it makes to society. It is in this context that the scholarly field of New Age studies formed, upon which I now focus. New Age studies The 1990s saw growing interest in what was described as the New Age within the social sciences and religious studies. The publication of a number of key works set the scene for the subsequent infusion of ideas about the New Age into more general theories about contemporary religion. This represented the emergence of a scholarly field of New Age studies sharing a number of common features but approaching the topic from different perspectives. One common feature in this field is the view that the social phenomena addressed form part of a movement identified as New Age, although this is qualified on account of their heterogeneity and lack of movement-like qualities. This ambiguity is reflected in unacknowledged terminological slippages in the majority of writings in the field, which can see the ‘New Age Movement’ become the ‘new age movement’, ‘New Age movements’ or ‘new age networks’, often within the space of a page. At times, I will draw attention to these slippages, because far from being trivial, they represent deeper ambiguities regarding the common classification of diverse phenomena. In his highly insightful analysis, Sutcliffe (2003a, p. 11) has criticized this ‘“New Age movement” metanarrative’ within the work of several scholars I discuss, but my attention focuses upon two other features: their methodologies and their understanding of authority. These correspond to the dilemmas of New Age studies highlighted in Chapter One; by examining them here, the scene is set for the establishment in the next chapter of a more critically aware approach towards phenomena usually classified as New Age. Four accounts Paul Heelas: Self-spirituality As the most influential scholar of the New Age, Paul Heelas’s emphasis falls on the authority of the self, but his studies have passed through three phases. His earliest writings identify ‘self-religions’ amongst Euro-American new religious movements, with a focus on their origins in Californian psychotherapeutic concepts and their relatively strongly governed organizations (1982; 1987; Heelas and Kohn, 1986; Thompson and Heelas, 1986). These include Scientology, the Rajneesh movement, and Warner Erhard’s est and other training seminars such as Exegesis. Significantly, Heelas discerns the treatment of the self as sacred in these groups, building upon his anthropological research into ‘indigenous psychologies’, which stressed the importance of looking at different cultures’ views on psychological topics, including conceptions of the self (Heelas, 1981). Heelas describes how contemporary Euro-America is becoming obsessed with psychological matters: ‘At the heart of this interest lies a distinctive view of the self … Our [sic] indigenous psychology focusses on the inner, private self … It also focusses on the self as agency’ (1981, p. 4). Preoccupied with ‘the exploration of

The field of New Age studies

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the self and the search for significance’ (1982, p. 69), people in these new religions ‘are coming to seek salvation in their inner being, in the psychological’ because of a loss of faith in ways of organizing and orientating the self ‘provided by traditional religions and large-scale institutions, such as industry’ (1981, p. 4). Heelas describes how these groups mesh together the subjective experiences of their practitioners in order to minimize discord and anxiety, thus providing a sought-after escape from anomie for relatively affluent classes (1982, pp. 75–7). ‘Idiosyncratic subjective experiences’, he writes, ‘are conceptualised by means of notions embedded in the standard code of psychobabble, these notions obscuring possible divergences in experience’ (ibid., p. 76). In the 1990s, Heelas refined his focus by identifying the New Age movement and emphasizing its intersection with capitalist entrepreneurialism and detraditionalization (1991; 1992; 1993; 1996b; 1996c; 1999). Continuity with the first phase is shown by his view that the New Age movement comprises those phenomena that fall under the label of ‘Self-spirituality’, that is, which share a common language (or lingua franca, as he puts it) which can be summed up by the notion that ‘the Self itself is sacred’ (1996b, p. 2). Confusingly, he also states that the New Age ‘simply refers to the assumption that humanity is progressing into a new era’ (ibid., p. 16) and draws out different elements in the lingua franca, such as the ideas that people’s lives are not working, that their lives could work because people are gods, and that the way to make their lives work (to start living as gods) is to utilize experiences to drop the ‘ego’ and liberate the ‘Self’ (ibid., pp. 18–20). Whatever the content of this worldview, its role as a common language means that the New Age is neither ‘incoherent’ nor a ‘mish-mash’ (1996b, p. 2), although it is also not an ‘organized entity’ (ibid., p. 16), a statement somewhat at odds with Heelas labelling it a movement. However, Heelas traces the movement’s historical origins through nineteenth and twentieth-century esoteric groups, the idea of the Age of Aquarius in the 1960s, and its more recent consolidation and incorporation into mainstream culture as detraditionalized Self-spirituality (ibid., ch. 2). He also presents an account of the movement’s various wings – such as ‘neo-pagan’, prosperity, human potential and countercultural – which represent ‘significant variations on the theme of Self-spirituality’ whilst considerably over-lapping and displaying differences that are more ‘apparent than real’ (ibid., pp. 29–30). Furthermore, he discusses the spectra of movements and beliefs that run into the New Age movement, such as healing, theistic Christianity and personal development (ibid., p. 116). In order to elucidate its lingua franca, Heelas draws upon a wide variety of written texts, including leaflets, pamphlets and adverts from workshops and other events. In particular, he relies upon books by William Bloom and Louise L. Hay (ibid., pp. 93–5, 225–6). Similarly, his earlier study of the self-religion Kerista is based upon its journal (Heelas, 1982). Although Heelas’s (1982, p. 69) earlier phase described ‘the socialisation of the subjective’ in self-religions, his new focus upon the New Age movement makes a different claim: ‘The New Age shows what “religion” looks like when it is organized in terms of what is taken to be the authority of the Self’ (1996b, p. 221). The phrase ‘what is taken’ is important here, because it allows for the theoretical possibility that social authorities may shape individuals’ subjective experiences. This possibility

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Possession, Power and the New Age

is explored by Heelas (ibid., pp. 206–7) in the following manner, which is worth quoting at length: What then of the possibility, equally likely from the point of view of the academic, that the inner spiritual realm does not exist? In the absence of all that is provided by Selfspirituality, the successful operation of ‘New Age’ forms of life must now be attributed to the operation of authority structures … But such authority structures, perhaps internalized as ‘conscience’, are precisely what the New Age is not meant to be about. Supposedly detraditionalized, it actually has to rely on established ‘voices’ in order to function satisfactorily. On this view, then, the ‘New Age’ works – when it does – because it is no longer New Age. New Agers might think that they are listening to their inner voices or are drawing upon their intuitive wisdom; in practice, however, they are listening to internalized renderings – by way of socialization – of what they have read about the Buddha or Gurdjieff. New Agers might think that Erhard serves as a context-setting, providing the environment to enable trainees to arrive at their own truths; in reality Erhard is serving as a powerful authority figure. New Agers might think that they are arriving at their own values; in practice they are adopting those which have become established as a set of variations on the theme of Self-spirituality. Supposedly inner-directed truth acquisition is, in fact, routinized. Indeed, the New Age corpus – on this account – might be thought of as a tradition, people coming to decisions as to what to value and how to act by way of reliance on the voices of all those who have become enshrined in what amounts to an – unacknowledged – canon, comprised, for example, of books by and about the teachers.

Whilst this is a theoretical possibility, Heelas’s (1996b, p. 35) view is that in practice internal (not internalized or socialized) authority is what distinguishes the New Age from other religions: ‘if there is too much external authority … one can conclude that one is no longer with the New Age. New Agers, in terms of their own self-understanding, do not simply read off from traditions, or traditionalized Gods and Goddesses, in the fashion, say, of a literalistic Christian,’ This is further demonstrated by his historical study, which explores how Self-spirituality has become detraditionalized since the 1970s by shedding its previous emphasis on established bodies of knowledge and gurus (ibid., p. 68). Although Heelas (1996a; 1996c) does not argue that this has been a radical detraditionalization in the sense of the complete exclusion of traditions, his view is that the degree to which something or someone is New Age depends on the degree of their exercise of self-authority to the exclusion of external authority. Thus, there are different degrees of involvement in being a ‘New Ager’, from ‘fully-fledged’ to ‘casual part-timer’ to ‘day tripper’ (1996b, pp. 117–19). Of theoretical importance to this phase of Heelas’s work is the relationship between the New Age and modernity. He charts the contemporary concern with the self as arising with the expressivism of the 1970s, when people became ‘selfexplorers’ as a reaction to the perceived failings of materialism and the social order in Euro-America (1992, pp. 141–2). It was the psychological wing of this widespread and increasingly mainstream cultural development that was radicalized in the ‘self-religions’ (the most influential of which was est) which came to lie at the ‘heart of the “New Age”’ (ibid., pp. 139, 143). In time, psychological expressivism declined, but the self-religions remained (ibid., p. 146), resulting in the New Age as

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‘a relatively significant practical and cultural resource’ within wider society (1996b, pp. 114–15). Heelas locates these developments in the broader societal turn from ‘public to private identity provision’ (1992, p. 148), recognizing that this can be utilized within the workplace, where work is seen as a spiritual discipline, giving rise to a ‘self-work ethic’: ‘By working, participants suppose that they have the opportunity to “work” on themselves, thereby actualizing the God within’ (ibid., p. 157). The New Age is therefore both ‘of’ and ‘for’ modernity since it both rests upon and extols widely held values (such as freedom, self-authority, progressivism and optimism), though in a sacralized form (1996b, p. 169). The cultural shift re-invigorating these values in Thatcherite Britain and Reaganite America gave much scope for the mainstreaming of the New Age that Heelas explores through innovations in business practice. But it acts also as a critique of modernity (which should not in any case be seen as singular: ibid., p. 170) in its refusal to reduce existence to materialism and in drawing upon pre-modern traditions even though these are used in a detraditionalized manner. The movement therefore encompasses a variety of cultural trajectories in its response to modernity (Heelas, 1993). In the third phase of Heelas’s thought, his specific focus on the New Age is replaced by a concern with recent developments within Euro-American religion more generally. This has involved what he variously calls ‘expressive spirituality’ (2000), ‘spirituality of life’ (2002), ‘New Age spiritualities of life’ (Heelas and Seel, 2003), and ‘subjective-life spirituality’ (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005). He now argues that the New Age is just one manifestation of a general shift in religion towards spirituality, in particular towards Self-spirituality. Religious practice and belief is therefore becoming more privatized and those forms of religion that allow room for this are growing against the trend of declining public participation in religion. Thus, alongside the process of secularization, certain forms of religion (although numerically small) are growing in membership and influence (Heelas, 2000, pp. 241–3). These include forms of Christianity that emphasize personal experience of the Holy Spirit, which Heelas compares with the New Age’s emphasis on the ‘higher self’ by describing it as the ‘HS factor’ (2002, p. 370). In so far as the New Age (that is, a radicalized Self-spirituality) increasingly intersects with (and is to be found within) religious forms such as Christianity, Heelas has both questioned its appropriateness as an academic label (2000, p. 250) and sought to qualify its application by using instead those terms already listed. The ‘New Age spirituality of life’, he writes, is no longer confined to the New Age movement (2002, p. 364). Indeed, ‘proto-New Age’ ‘life values’, such as belief in a higher power and the reflexive involvement of the self, are common currency within the population, especially amongst the young (Heelas and Seel, 2003, p. 234). This revised perspective has been empirically investigated with Linda Woodhead in a study mapping the ‘sacred landscape’ in Kendal, a small, overwhelmingly white town on the edge of the Lake District National Park in Cumbria, England (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005). Aiming to investigate changes in this landscape in Britain, through ethnography, interviews and questionnaires they investigate the weekly associational activities in two areas of this landscape: the ‘congregational domain’ (primarily Christian groups) and the ‘holistic milieu’, ‘sometimes still called

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Possession, Power and the New Age

“New Age”’, which especially includes therapies such as yoga and massage (ibid., pp. x, 13). Heelas and Woodhead (2005, p. 9) explain their findings that the holistic milieu is (slowly) growing and that the majority of Christian congregations are (quickly) declining, by reference to the ‘subjectivization’ of contemporary society: those parts of the sacred landscape that are compatible with this are faring better than those that are not. This process involves a shift ‘away from life lived in terms of external or “objective” roles, duties and obligations, and a turn towards life lived by reference to one’s own subjective experiences’ (ibid., p. 3). The former is indicative of ‘lifeas religion’, dominant in the congregational domain (with the partial exception of some groups such as the Society of Friends or Quakers), whilst they label the latter ‘subjective-life spirituality’, dominant in the holistic milieu (ibid., p. 5). The equation of the latter with Heelas’s earlier conception of the truly New Age is clear: ‘the key value for the mode of life-as is conformity to external authority, whilst the key value for the mode of subjective-life is authentic connection with the inner depths of one’s unique life-in-relation’, that is, ‘“to become who I truly am”’ (ibid., p. 4). So, ‘life-as religion cannot authorize the cultivation of unique personal subjectivities’ (ibid., p. 131). Whilst acknowledging that the ‘sacred landscape’ in Britain is very small (in Kendal, about 8 per cent of the population are weekly participants at congregations and about 1.6 per cent in the holistic milieu), Heelas and Woodhead (2005, pp. 33–48) conclude that whilst a spiritual revolution, in the sense of the replacement of (life-as) religion by (subjective-life) spirituality, has neither occurred in Britain nor is likely to occur in the near future, there are clear tendencies towards this. In particular, ‘although the spiritual revolution has not taken place with regard to weekly associational activities, it looks very much as though it has occurred, or is occurring, in significant sectors of the general culture’, such as in the consumption of products, the media, schools and healthcare (ibid., p. 72). In addition, they claim that the holistic domain is attractive to women who grew up in the 1960s, enabling them to react against ‘life-as’ roles (ibid., pp. 103–7, 136). Heelas’s corpus is therefore a sustained analysis of what he views as the rise and extension of self-authority, seen as elaborated within a particular worldview. Despite different perspectives, this core theme is found in each of the following three accounts of the New Age. Michael York: the network of networks Michael York focuses upon a number of interrelated movements that he sees as comprising a single network, especially distinguishing between its New Age and ‘neo-pagan’ camps, where the latter are more orientated to the earthly and physical side of existence (1994, p. 18; 1995, pp. 145–77). York’s (1995) main aim is to consider whether this network can be conceptualized using sociological typologies of religious organizations. His conclusion is identical to that reached by Marilyn Ferguson, in her partisan account of Aquarian transformation a decade earlier, which York himself describes as a ‘virtual handbook for the New Age movement’ (Ferguson, 1981; York, 1995, p. 330). This is that the New Age and ‘neopagan’ movements comprise a network of networks or SPIN, a segmented polycentric integrated network, a concept that Ferguson herself took from the sociologists Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine (York, 1995, pp. 324–7). The key characteristic of a SPIN

The field of New Age studies

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is its lack of organization such that authority is dispersed throughout its structure, not concentrated in any centre. In fact, again assuming Ferguson’s conclusions, York states that the New Age, ‘neo-paganism’ and other movements constitute a ‘holistic movement’ or ‘SPIN of SPINs’ (ibid., p. 330). Empirically, in The Emerging Network, York proceeds primarily through presentation of the views of what he considers to be the spokespersons or representatives of the New Age and neo-pagan movements. Secondarily, he includes of a variety of statistical surveys, by himself and others, to explore New Agers’ and neo-pagans’ identities and attitudes, such as towards sexuality. Lastly, he presents his own participant observation of two groups and one pagan ritual, although in a book of over 300 pages only 11 are devoted to ‘New Age and neo-paganism as practised and observed’ (1995, pp. 223–35). York adopts the theory of postmodernization to explain this network of networks. The shift to a postmodern society in the 1970s creates a fragmented world, such that this network reflects ‘the freedom inherent in the current religious supermarket consumerism’ (1994, p. 15). Criticizing Heelas, York (1997) argues that postmodernism should not be defined in terms of being against all metanarratives, but only those that are reductionist. The ‘New Age movement’ articulates a metanarrative of experience in which importance is accorded to whatever feels right for an individual. Importantly, York (ibid., p. 414) states: … New Age identity is less that of self-authority as it is of self-selection, the choosing by the individual between contending authorities. It is the individual who now selects to which ‘authority’ he or she shall subscribe. The testing of different voices and systems, the exploring and seeking that the New Ager involves himself/herself in, is part of the spiritual consumerism, the religious supermarket, of post-modernity.

This non-reductionist, experiential feature of the New Age explains the presence within it of elements marginalized within Christianity, indeed those elements that run counter to Christian belief and practice: ‘We see today the New Age as a partial reconstitution from the flotsam of rejected Christian and quasi-Christian ideas of a competing theological position’ (York, 1994, p. 17). This focus upon dissonant traditions is also present in Sutcliffe’s work, although he reaches quite different conclusions regarding social organization. Steven Sutcliffe: the New Age taxon Steven Sutcliffe’s studies represent the most reflexively aware research within the field of New Age studies, due to his critical approach to emic and etic uses of the term ‘New Age’. In Children of the New Age, Sutcliffe (2003b) focuses on what he calls seekers and seekership, through historical and ethnographic study of the Findhorn community in Scotland, religious fairs, and the Unit of Service meditation group based upon the writings of Alice Bailey (a British Theosophist and founder of the Arcane School). Regarding the social organizations within which people seek, he contends that ‘New Age identification and proselytization is and has been restricted to the predilections of discrete groups and individuals, rather than characterizing the coherent agenda of a large and enduring collectivity, let alone an operative movement’ (1997, p. 101). Instead,

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Possession, Power and the New Age

drawing on Campbell (1972), Sutcliffe views contemporary phenomena as the latest developments in the long tradition of a cultic milieu: ‘the alternative network is a largely extra-ecclesial countercultural web that both generates and supports variant religious cultures. As such it has persisted in the shadows of mainstream religion and penetrated its margins over the last one hundred years or so’ (1997, p. 102). Within this web, ‘“New Age” is a term episodically articulated within its wider networks of religious alternativism’ (1997, p. 105). As already noted, this radical position within the field of New Age studies is informed by Foucault’s genealogical method, enabling Sutcliffe (2003b) to criticize the interpretation of New Age as a movement as an uncritical adoption of a false etic category, and scholars’ use of the term New Age as an uncritical adoption of an emic agenda. Research in this area instead needs to pay attention to the heterogeneous emic discourses found within ‘alternative spirituality’ (ibid., pp. 9–10). In so doing, Sutcliffe attempts to recover the ‘lost history’ of ‘New Age’, by paying attention to ‘popular reading practices’ (ibid., pp. 4–5). He views texts (and thus the various emic discourses, emblems and idioms within them) as a form of ‘material culture’ which needs to be studied in terms of ‘their conditions of production and distribution, and the ways in which their audience uses them’ (ibid., p. 20). Furthermore, the ‘New Age’ ‘taxon’ must be investigated ‘orally, textually, and in ritual practices, by embodied persons in specific times and places’ (2003a, p. 14). Through this method, Sutcliffe (2003b, pp. 3–4) identifies a historical shift between two uses of the term ‘New Age’ by insiders. Until the 1970s, ‘New Age’ is used as an emblem of apocalypticism, often marked by an ascetic attitude. Here, it was found within a detraditionalized field of occult seekership, such as in Theosophical Society splinter groups and small groups in the Cold War era (ibid., p. 35). This was transformed in the 1970s by being diluted through a ‘polycentric network’, resulting in the use of ‘New Age’ as an idiom of self-realization, accompanying an expressive attitude and found within a proliferation of networks and groups (ibid., p. 85). Sutcliffe therefore investigates genealogically the history of the term, by focusing on how it has been used by people in their diverse, contingent and vernacular discourses and practices, rather than assuming the existence of a coherent social movement or set of beliefs (ibid., pp. 3–4, 19–21; 2003a, pp. 18–19). He places this history within the ‘far broader field’ of ‘alternative spirituality’, which he sees as a sub-type of popular religion characterized by a discourse of spirituality and networking based around small groups (2003b, pp. 5, 11–12). In fact, he concludes that ‘New Age’ is ‘the key taxon’ within this field (2003a, p. 13). Sutcliffe views seekership as essential to people’s actions in this field. Seekers are ‘virtuosic individualists’ of a charismatic nature, although there are both different types of seekers and different sorts of groups or communities that can result from their aggregation (2003b, pp. 196, 225). Sutcliffe (1997, pp. 106–11) distinguishes three models of seekership: singular, serial and multiple. The first, ‘unusual in New Age circles’, focuses on an inherited tradition and is often attached to an institution, such as the Findhorn Foundation or The Lucis Trust (ibid., p. 106). The second changes direction and affiliation more than once, adhering to traditions only temporarily. Sutcliffe (ibid., p. 108) notes that ‘the serial seeker is a type common both to the pioneers of New Age and to prominent individuals in the alternative network in

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general’. However, the third is the most common in alternative spirituality: multiple seekers ‘proceed sequentially and diachronically’, in ‘typically a multidirectional and synchronic activity’, where ‘a number of religions or facets thereof are filtered and explored more-or-less simultaneously’ (ibid.). Multiple seekers’ attitudes include openness to change through new experiences and display a hedonistic or ludic character. Sutcliffe (2003b, pp. 207–8) relates the prevalence of multiple seekership to the ‘“pluralisation of lifeworlds” inherent in postmodernity’, in which there is a ‘refashion[ing of] the self as an appropriate vessel – organismic, reflexive, relational – for navigating the rapids of contemporary culture’. Arising in a context whereby social institutions are disembedded and class positions are more mobile (Sutcliffe, 2000, p. 30), the self becomes the dominant or ‘ultimate’ religious authority (Sutcliffe, 1995). Resulting organizational forms do not progress beyond the ‘most simple’, since seekership sabotages anything beyond a ‘modicum of institutionalisation’ (Sutcliffe, 2003b, p. 224). Sutcliffe’s (2003a) call for New Age studies to re-orientate themselves is therefore a response to the lack of focus on practices exhibited by writers such as Heelas and York. There are a growing number of studies that attempt a more socially contextualized understanding of the New Age through a focus on either a specific practice or specific location. Next I will consider one such ethnography carried out by anthropologists, which is of particular interest for the comparison made with other religions and social movements. Ruth Prince and David Riches: the Alternative Community in Glastonbury Ruth Prince and David Riches’s The New Age in Glastonbury (2000) is one of the most theoretically complex analyses of the New Age to date, deploying a methodology and comparisons that challenges most other studies. In contrast to other approaches in this field, Prince and Riches’s study is distinctive for setting out to look at the ‘social processes’ of the creation of the New Age as a ‘religious movement’ (ibid., pp. 7–9). Uniquely, they focus on the everyday life of the participants in what they call the ‘Alternative Community’ in Glastonbury, namely the ‘practical activities – forging relationships, keeping healthy, engaging in work, educating children’ (ibid., p. 4) or the ‘total ethnographic arena’ (ibid., p. 19). As such, they eschew the primacy given to ritual practices, beliefs or personal narratives in other studies (ibid., pp. 14, 28). They claim that this approach allows them to hypothesize about the factors that lead to the existence of the movement and to deduce from these factors its particular features (ibid., p. 16). Rooted in communitas (which involves both social life and imaginations of that life), practical activities, they write, act as the foundation upon which is constructed the cultural vision and representation of the New Age (ibid., pp. 25, 35–9, 233–63). It is the particular form of communitas in the movement that allows Prince and Riches to make comparisons with other religious movements. Purporting that an ‘“ultimate experience” of participating in the community’ (ibid., p. 35) lies behind the formation of religious movements, Prince and Riches (ibid., pp. 6–8) contend that for ‘New Agers’ this is ‘the sense of an in-common participation in a non-mainstream flow’, articulated ‘through a distinctive combination of relatively holistic cosmological ideas and relatively individualistic social practices’.

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Possession, Power and the New Age

The core of their argument is that New Age communitas articulates a paradoxical juxtaposition of individualism (which they see as primary) and holism (secondary), engendering a particular experience of space and time, and hence a particular form of social organization (ibid., pp. 40–45). This radical individualism coupled with a holistic vision marks out the New Age from mainstream Euro-American society: what unites New Agers is that they ‘everywhere definitely experience the sense of an incommon participation in a non-mainstream flow’ (ibid., p. 8). Thus, the emphasis on New Age beliefs and practices by other scholars is misleading, since these should be understood polythetically, that is, as involving a number of elements not each of which is necessarily believed or practised, such that the movement consists of a ‘family resemblance’ (ibid., pp. 55–6). Prince and Riches (ibid., p. 203) consider the Alternative Community at Glastonbury to be populated by ‘fully-fledged’ New Agers because of its concrete separation from mainstream society. As such, it is an exemplary form for the construction of religious movements: its non-episodic, low social density and spatial discontinuity from the mainstream mark it out from other manifestations of the New Age movement, such as the Findhorn community and travellers (which display ‘un-New Age like’ qualities, such as a division of labour), as well as from religious movements such as the Hare Krishna and Hutterites (ibid., pp. 39, 273, 278–89). In this respect, this Alternative Community is akin to certain hunter-gatherer societies (ibid., pp. 217–19), a point that Riches (2003) develops elsewhere. In developing this perspective from individuals’ ‘social transactions’, Prince and Riches (ibid., pp. 8–9) eschew explanations of the existence and form of the New Age derived from belief systems or ‘social forces’ such as class. The New Age movement neither exists nor takes the form it does because of people’s social backgrounds, needs or beliefs, or because of social processes such as relating to class or postmodernism (ibid., pp. 15–16, 208, 293). Rather, it exists because of the choices, made by people who are liminal to mainstream society, to leave that society and join non-mainstream communities, based upon space–time preferences (ibid., pp. 214, 278). The radical individualism, flexibility and egalitarianism of the Alternative Community’s social organization, then, represents a choice by those already disposed to those features, presumably on the basis of upbringing and personal experience, and this is why there is an over-representation of the middle-classes, of women, and of the middle-aged (in other words those from the baby-boom generation) in the New Age (ibid., p. 290). Common themes This review of selected key thinkers demonstrates a number of crucial similarities across the field of New Age studies, despite variations in methodology and theory. Most obviously, there is virtual consensus that a set of diverse social phenomena of beliefs, practices and groups can be categorized as New Age, whether or not these represent a movement. Scholars discern this unity in the shared language, vision or worldview through which insiders use the term ‘New Age’. Sutcliffe accepts the centrality of the New Age taxon amongst disparate phenomena, even if he eschews the idea that they constitute a movement. Similar conclusions have been reached by

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historians of religion such as Hanegraaff (1996) and Melton (1988; 1992; Melton et al. 1990), and by interview-based researchers such as Steyn (1995) and Bloch (1998). However, there is a more fundamental reason why these disparate phenomena are classed together, namely the view by these scholars that amongst them there is a discursive emphasis upon the self and that self-authority is paramount. This feature of New Age studies has been almost entirely neglected in reviews of the field, which are preoccupied with assessing whether there is an academic consensus that the New Age constitutes a movement. Yet, of greater sociological importance is the view that the New Age (whether or not it is a movement) is seen as being marked by the exercise of self-authority, that is, by individuals’ own, internal authority rather than external authorities such as teachers, leaders, sacred texts, belief-systems or institutions. This view embraces even quite distinct approaches within the field, such as Sutcliffe’s genealogical study and Prince and Riches’s emphasis on practical activities, as well as Hanegraaff’s (1999) survey of New Age literature, Doktór’s (1999) questionnaire survey of Polish students, Zaidman’s (2003) interviews with consumers of religious objects at pilgrimage sites in Israel, and ethnographic approaches such as by Danforth (1989) on firewalking, Brown (1997) on channelling, Corrywright (2003) on New Age webs, Hetherington (2000) on New Age travellers, Ivakhiv (2001; 2003) on New Age pilgrimages to Sedona and Glastonbury, and Nordquist (1978) on a Californian community established by a guru in the tradition of Self-Realization, itself established by a Hindu monk of the Swami Order in Los Angeles in 1920, studied through participant observation and attitude-measurement. This emphasis on self-authority also lies at the source of debates surrounding whether or not pagans should be classed as New Agers, since they too are commonly understood to privilege self-authority. In fact, most studies that insist on distinguishing pagans from New Agers end up simply embracing them by a higher level of categorization, uniting them for their common emphasis upon the self, as in York’s network of networks or SPIN of SPINs and Bloch’s (1998, p. 2) embrace of ‘New Agers’ and ‘neo-pagans’ because they share an emphasis on ‘the self … [as] the final authority as to what to practice or believe’. Three further key themes derive from this emphasis on self-authority. Firstly, the New Age (and paganism) is typically taken to be spiritual rather than religious. Scholars equate religion with the exercise of external authority, whilst spirituality is interpreted as involving a far greater degree of individual freedom and choice (see also Howell, 2005, on the situation in Indonesia). Secondly, seekership is used to describe individuals’ paths within a spiritual, rather than religious, setting. This view of New Agers as seekers emphasizes their idiosyncratic and unique routes within the network or movement, as well as construing this in terms of a market (see also Redden, 2005; York, 2001).8 Thirdly, certain groups of people are seen as most likely to favour the exercise of self-authority and seekership, and thus to be New Agers: the white, educated middle-class (see also Barker, 1994; Rose, 1998). These considerations of New Age studies suggest that this scholarly field is as much concerned with the construction of normative boundaries as the broader social field of interest in the New Age, discussed at the start of this chapter. Within an academic climate of secularization theory, in which religion in Euro-America is seen

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Possession, Power and the New Age

as increasingly irrelevant, New Age studies posit the existence of a group of religious phenomena that involves precisely those people usually considered the vanguard of secularist thinking and practice. Through reference to the New Age, sociologists of religion redefine the boundaries of their own interests and importance. Thus, these references to self-authority, spirituality and seekership in the New Age have filtered into wider debates within the sociology of religion. The past few years have seen these ideas adopted and developed in theoretical discussions about individualization, privatization, secularization, postmodernization, globalization, consumerism and, most recently, complexity. I now discuss these, but it should be remembered that the strength of these theoretical developments is dependent upon the strength of methodological and theoretical approaches in the New Age studies upon which they draw. If these are flawed, as I will argue in the next chapter, then the direction taken by much recent sociology of religion must be reconsidered. The New Age motif in the sociology of religion Until recently, sociologists of religion bemoaned the marginal location of their subdiscipline (Beckford, 1989, pp. 13–17, Berger and Luckmann, 1963, and Turner, 1991, pp. 2–7). Under the impress of structural-functionalist theories of society, religious institutions were seen as squeezed out of the differentiated institutions of modern life, leaving them relatively impotent (even if they continued to flourish, as in the United States) and making religiosity merely a private affair of voluntary choice. Apart from documenting this secularization, from the 1960s sociologists of religion tended to focus on the small but highly diverse and publicly contentious new religious movements that appeared to flourish amongst Euro-American youths. Often seen as countercultural excrescences in a pluralizing religious marketplace, these were generally viewed as indicative of, rather than evidence against, secularization (Wilson and Barker, 2005). In the 1980s, however, the impact of theoretical and empirical studies, deriving largely from outside the sub-discipline, began its reinvigoration (Beckford, 2001, pp. 229–30). On the one hand, the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences brought issues of identity, popular culture and social movements into interpretations of society. On the other hand, the resurgence of political religion and mass conversions led to the questioning of the unilinear and universal nature of secularization (Robertson, 1992). Whilst secularization theory tended to be amended rather than abandoned, sociologists of religion began to pay much more attention to the public or societal significance of religion, even in its private forms. The sub-discipline began to split into two related directions: one focusing upon political religions and processes of deprivatization (for example, Casanova, 1994), with special attention paid to religious fundamentalism, the other upon continuing processes of privatization, although now with a recognition of the societal importance of resulting forms of religion (or, as they increasingly began to be named, spirituality). It was within this latter direction that the New Age increasingly has been developed as a motif to exemplify religious life in late twentieth century and early twenty- first century Euro-America. This draws upon the academic field of New Age

The field of New Age studies

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studies that I have already shown proliferated from the 1990s with an interpretive consensus regarding the centrality of self-authority. In discussing this direction, I will focus upon three key related areas in which the New Age features as a motif: secularization theory, privatization and individualization theories, and theories of macro-social transformations. Secularization One version of secularization was elaborated in the 1960s by Durkheimian sociologists seeking to discern the nature and content of phenomena in modern society that addressed innate human-social needs for ultimate meaning, and thus bring the sociology of religion back into the centre of its parent discipline. Building upon their social constructivist account of society (Berger and Luckmann, 1963; 1967), Berger (1970; 1973) and Luckmann (1967) argue that modernity’s weakening of a plausibility structure leads to a religious marketplace in which privatized searches for plausibility arise that are, nevertheless, socially significant. In The Invisible Religion, Luckmann (1967, pp. 35, 98–106) describes how ‘churchoriented religion has become a marginal phenomenon in modern society’, whilst the rise of the ‘autonomy’ of the individual has led to ‘assortments of “ultimate” meanings’ that are flexible but unstable. Downplaying the ‘reflection and conscious deliberation’ involved in the construction of these ‘private spheres’, his view of this ‘quest’ clearly resonates with later New Age studies: ‘The individual who is to find a source of “ultimate” significance in the subjective dimension of his [sic] biography embarks upon a process of self-realization and self-expression that is, perhaps, not continuous – since it is immersed in the recurrent routines of everyday life – but certainly interminable’ (ibid., pp. 105, 110). Similarly, Berger (1973, pp. 155–6) believes that in a secularized, modern society, ‘The individual in fact “discovers” religion within his [sic] own subjective consciousness, somewhere “deep down” within himself [sic]’. Luckmann (1990) links explicitly with New Age studies in his article ‘Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion?’, arguing that it represents a shift from ‘“great” transcendences’ of life and death, with which Christianity was concerned, to ‘“little” transcendences’ of self-realization, personal autonomy and self-expression, where the individual is held as sacred. The market in transcendence now consists of the mass media, churches and sects, ‘residual carriers of nineteenth century secular ideologies’, and ‘subinstitutional, “new” religious communities around charismatics, commercialized enterprises in the fold of the “New Age”, the consciousness“expanding” line, and so on’ (Luckmann, ibid., pp. 135–6). For Luckmann (ibid., pp. 136–7), the ‘“New Age” movement’ (or ‘Movement’) is marked by networks ‘characterized by varied – generally weak – forms of institutionalization’ in which individuals engage in syncretism or bricolage. Indeed, he later states that ‘The New Age movement illustrates the social form of the invisible religion’ (1996, p. 75). In contrast to these positions, Steve Bruce (2002, pp. 75–105) upholds the orthodox model of secularization by arguing that ‘New Age spirituality’ (or ‘religiosity’) has little social, or even individual, impact, resulting from its emphasis on ‘individual autonomy’ and belief in no authority higher than the

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Possession, Power and the New Age

‘individual self’. Indeed, he claims that ‘Individual autonomy, the freedom to choose, competes with the power of the community. To the extent that the former is stressed, the latter is necessarily weakened’ (ibid., p. 93). Bruce (1998, p. 23) further argues against ‘the sociology implied in New Age theories’ that ‘New Age spirituality’ provides personal and social solutions, at the same time contesting the positive normative evaluation of the New Age by scholars such as Heelas (see Heelas, 1998a for a response). Bruce also deconstructs its attractiveness, claiming that it suits a society that is ‘short on authority and long on consumer rights’ (2002, p. 89), especially attracting the middle-class, ‘whose more pressing material needs have been satisfied’ (1996, p. 218), and, for that same reason, white people (2002, p. 89). Even so, and again in contrast to Heelas, on the basis of surveys he asserts the relatively small number of people involved with the New Age, particularly given the huge numbers of those who have ceased to attend church in recent decades (ibid., pp. 80–82). It is perhaps because of this satisfaction that Bruce (2002, pp. 97–8) views the New Age as reconciling people to their place in the world, rather than prompting them to change either their personal situation or social context. His picture of the New Age is therefore of a form of religion suited to a consumer society whose privileged members are now seeking similar uncommitted ways to consume nonmaterial goods, hence its constitution in terms of ‘client cults’, ‘structured around the individual relationship between a consumer and a purveyor’, and ‘audience cults’, ‘structured around the mass distribution of the word, spoken and printed’ (Bruce, 1996, pp. 196–7). Whilst a growing body of work has followed Luckmann in viewing contemporary spirituality, including the New Age, as socially significant, this has also begun to address its complex relationship to those religious traditions that Luckmann and Bruce believe are waning. This can be explored by considering discussions concerning privatization and individualization in which the New Age strongly figures. Privatization and individualization Religion in the United States Kelly Besecke (2001; 2005) has developed Luckmann’s attention to transcendent meaning, but argues against him to assert that spirituality is reflexive and that such reflexive spirituality is not invisible. Her research focuses upon the ‘growing societal conversation about … “spiritual matters”’ in America today (Besecke, 2005, p. 180), empirically investigated through discussion groups not affiliated to any particular religious tradition (one organized by private individuals, the others through an adult education centre) that meet regularly and attract between 30 and 50 people. The conversations in these groups explore ‘Transcendent meanings – references to a context for life that exists on a plane beyond (“transcending”) apparent reality’ (ibid., p. 181). Coming from a range of religious backgrounds and commitments (or none at all), including ‘New Agers’, participants do not constitute a ‘religious community’ and yet do not simply focus on individual personal well-being (ibid., p. 192). Rather, their meetings are ‘an excerpt of a larger, fluid, and dynamic

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societal conversation’ involving the different religious traditions and organizations, including ‘New Age’ groups, in which participants are involved (ibid.). Because of this, Besecke (2001, p. 368; 2005, pp. 181, 186–7) describes as misplaced Berger’s and Luckmann’s distinctions between institutional or public religion and individual or private religion, and thus argues against the privatization thesis. Yet, Besecke’s (2001, p. 368) statement that ‘The language of reflexive spirituality recognizes the authority and integrity of religious traditions’ is immediately qualified: ‘only in the proverbial “last instance” does individual authority carry the trump’. Situated within a wider American sociology of religion engagement with these issues, and drawing strongly on Wade Clark Roof, Besecke’s criticisms extend also to the work of Robert Bellah and Robert Wuthnow. In Habits of the Heart, Bellah and his colleagues (Bellah et al., 1985) opened up the area of religious individualism not in the sense of Americans’ ability to choose from among religious denominations, but in terms of their ability to draw from a variety of religious traditions. In what I would call a thesis of extreme privatization (see Roof, 1999, p. 42), Bellah and his colleagues drew attention to the emphasis on the self, exemplified by the idiosyncratic religiosity of one woman in their study, whose name they used to label this: Sheilaism. They saw this development as threatening the moral integrity of American society that had previously been constituted through communal denominational and familial attachments, a point later reflected in the work of Wuthnow (Rose, 1999b, pp. 180–81). If ‘One can opt for Buddhism on Monday, Zen on Tuesday, Sufism on Wednesday and have the rest of the week off’ (Turner, 1991, p. 200), the religious basis for community appears weak or nonexistent. In positions closely linked to Bellah, Wuthnow and Roof have more recently focused upon the personal meanings and practices of contemporary spirituality. On the basis of in-depth interviews, Wuthnow (1998, pp. 1–11) asserts that there has been a ‘reordering’ from a ‘spirituality of sacred spaces’ to a ‘spirituality of seeking’, where spirituality refers to the negotiation of ‘personal relationships’ to the ‘sacred’. This new spirituality ‘focuses less on submission to a higher power and more on cultivating trust in oneself’ (or ‘one’s inner self’) (ibid., pp. 154–6). Unlike Luckmann and Bellah, however, Wuthnow (2001) refuses to draw a line between individualization and institutionalization, and views seeking as rooted in available institutional resources, although these should not be seen as limited to religious organizations, but as also including small groups and the products of consumer society. The considerable ‘extent to which popular spirituality is rooted in experiences shaped by institutional religion’ also means that family backgrounds are highly significant (Wuthnow, 1998, p. 125). Wuthnow (2001, pp. 307, 312) believes that research should focus on ‘spiritual practice’ as ‘a cluster of intentional activities concerned with relating to the sacred’ (in other words, to a ‘transcendent order of reality’). Although much spiritual seeking occurs within the ‘New Age movement’, Wuthnow (1998, pp. 120–24) contends this is a marginal phenomenon on the basis that ‘New Age beliefs’ are held by a minority and because much popular interest and ‘supernatural experience’ involves miracles and angels, and are thus grounded in Christian spirituality. Through similar methods researching the American baby-boom generation born between 1946 and 1962, Roof (1999) discusses how Christian

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denominationalization has gradually made room for a multi-faith marketplace in which religion is increasingly privatized, even for those regularly attending church. This growth in individualization is linked to their relative affluence and to crises in legitimate authority, so that growing numbers of people place loyalty in their own judgements or experiences rather than in external authorities or ‘communal loyalties’ (Greer and Roof, 1992, pp. 347–8). This ‘highly subjective, deeply personal form of religion’ is to be found across different sorts of religion, including ‘new modes of spirituality’ such as the ‘New Age movement’ and amongst those with no religious affiliation (ibid., pp. 347, 352). In these varieties of seekership, which Roof claims involves three-quarters of the American population, spiritual experiences of the ‘sacred’ are emphasized and conceptions of the self (involving effort and reflexivity) are at stake (Roof, 1999, pp. 33–5). Roof (ibid., p. 204) situates the New Age within a broader category of metaphysical believers and seekers distinguished by a spiritual identity but not a religious one, noting that few people use the term to identify themselves and that even this proportion appears to be falling. In what Roof (ibid., pp. 42, 75) names ‘reflexive spirituality’, ‘the self is elevated to a higher level of making spiritual choices and negotiating frameworks of meaning drawing off institutional and more popular-based religious discourses, all in a context where for many Americans, especially those born after World War II, relationships with organized religion are often rather tenuous’. Whilst individuals now relate to religious ‘scripts’ in their own ways, there is still variation, from where these scripts act as ‘elements of a living faith’, in which ‘spiritual support’ is balanced with ‘spiritual openness’, to the more ‘extreme’ form of questing in which scripts are a resource for exploration (ibid., p. 42). For this reason, Roof distinguishes the ‘eclectic seeker’ ‘Vicki Feinstein’ from among his five typical case-studies, arguing that her ‘frantic, seemingly endless trail of searching’ is not the example to which most in her generation aspire (ibid., pp. 29–33, 42, 313). Although not noted by Roof, she is the only one not to be involved with a Christian church or related small group. In the choice of his terminology (‘frantic’) and his insistence on the lack of institutionalization and ‘less grounded style’ of this ‘New Spirituality’, Roof (ibid., p. 308) contends that it will be ‘short-lived’. In reproducing the normative sociology of Bellah’s approach, Roof joins Wuthnow (1998, pp. 132, 168–98), who addresses how the spirituality of seeking may avoid shallowness (‘spirituality lite’) through a ‘practice-oriented spirituality’ and so become the basis for the weaving of a moral fabric, namely by grounding itself in committed regular practice. Like Wuthnow, then, Roof (1999, pp. 126–7) is particularly interested in the small groups through which people reconnect to religious traditions, as seen, for example, in the growth of church study groups comprised of those seeking self-reflexive insights into their denomination’s tradition. This is therefore a process that ‘might be termed retraditionalizating, or creating new cultural formations that provide alternative visions of spiritual and ethical life’, rather than ‘detraditionalization’ (ibid., p. 171). Religion in Europe This emphasis upon changed relationships to the sacred through the idiosyncratic resourcing of institutions is paralleled in European sociology of religion. Danièle Hervieu-Léger (2000, pp. 106–12) claims that the

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pluralization of meaning in ‘post-traditional society’, results in a fragmentation of the sacred as ‘a force and a presence that is stronger than self’, and its disassociation from a ‘chain of belief’. Modernity leads to a ‘structural transformation of belief’ in which the ‘way of believing’ is more important than what is believed (ibid., pp. 70–72). Rather than obliterating or degrading religion, then, modernity transforms the individual’s relationship to the sacred (ibid., pp. 74–5; my emphasis): Modernity has deconstructed the traditional systems of believing, but has not forsaken belief. Believing finds expression in an individualized, subjective and diffuse form, and resolves into a multiplicity of combinations and orderings of meaning which are elaborated independently of control by institutions of believing, by religious institutions in particular. This independence is, however, relative inasmuch as it is restricted by economic, social and cultural determinations which weigh heavily on the symbolic activity of individuals no less than on their material and social lives. It is nonetheless a real independence because the inalienable right of individuals to conceive the world for themselves is asserted as a counterpart to progress in the practical mastery exercised over the material world.

What is of particular interest to Hervieu-Léger (ibid., p. 76), then, is the type of validation or legitimation applied to ‘the act of believing’, namely ‘the authority of a tradition … invoked (whether explicitly, half-explicitly or implicitly) in support of the act of believing’. The ‘New Age movement’ (or ‘“New Age” movement’, or ‘“New Age” networks’) in particular makes this ‘modern mutation of religious individualism’ visible, for it represents the ‘self-validation of faith’ (HervieuLéger, 2001, pp. 164–7). Yet, this does not mean there are no social bonds in the movement; rather, such bonds are ‘comprised of episodic recourse to resource centers: bookstores, educational facilities, convention centers, and so forth. … What prevents one from being able to speak of “religion” is a common reference to a shared reality, constitutive of a tradition-making authority’ (ibid., p. 166). Even so, Hervieu-Léger (ibid., pp. 165–7) believes there are limits to such self-validation, since for personal meanings to be stabilized they must find confirmation outside of themselves, giving way ‘to a regime of mutual validation of faith’ that acts as ‘a principle of the constitution of “New Age” networks’. In fact, varieties of validation of faith represent a historical trajectory of Christianity and its organizational types, from institutional (the church), to communal (the sect, ‘sealed by the Reformation’), to mutual (mysticism, as in New Age networks), to self-validation (ibid., pp. 169–71). This trajectory, however, does not involve the replacement of one regime of validation by another. The ‘deinsitutionalization’ of post-traditional societies, for example, hides the ways in which institutional religion is reshaped in two opposite directions: mutual, in which beliefs and practices are relativized by the recognition of the personal journeys of group members, and communal, in which small-scale universes of certitude arise (ibid., pp. 173–4). Working from a similar perspective, Grace Davie has described the sacred as being reformulated in the optimistic consumerism of 1990s Britain. Religions increasingly market their products, enabling individuals to choose from among them rather than between them, as typified by the ‘phenomenon’ of the ‘New Age’, reflecting the ‘postmodern’ emphasis on fragmentation, self-selection and self-fulfillment (Davie, 1994,

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pp. 39–41, 199–200). In such a situation, people believe without belonging (ibid., p. 199). Davie (2002, pp. 39–40) avers, however, that this situation is different from that in the United States, where, as the work of Roof and Wuthnow show, ‘spiritual seeking’ takes place not only outside organized religion but also within it. These recent developments in the sociology of religion are important for building upon earlier attempts to amend secularization theory by emphasizing the continued public and institutional dimensions of religion. In particular, these are seen as intrinsically linked to the individualization or privatization of religion, in which negotiations with the sacred are established through the exercise of self-authority. Yet, all these theorists focus upon the New Age as an extreme form of this, in which institutions and self-commitment are weakest. As such, the New Age is seen as untypical of religion or spirituality as a whole. However, as will now be shown, the New Age is central for theorists who focus more strongly upon macro-social changes of postmodernization and globalization. Postmodernization and globalization Theoretical accounts of religion in postmodernity typically have focused on the authority of the consumer in a detraditionalized context of multiple choices (see, for example, Aldridge, 2000). Commonly linked to the New Age or, in Bauman’s more critical account, privatized peak-experiences, such consumerism is also related to the rise of religious fundamentalism as an attempt to overcome the uncertainties of the postmodern condition (Bauman, 1998; Lyon, 2000). Describing the New Age as the convergence of ‘new Eastern and mystical traditions and the religious disenchantment of many Westerners’, David Lyon (1993, pp. 119–23) considers it to be a symbolic resource of postmodernity since both are responses to, or expressions of, a crisis of modernity.9 This crisis has come about through the collapse of certainties, in part associated with the rise of new social and identity movements, such as feminism and environmentalism, and changes in working conditions, involving the expansion in educated white-collar workers (ibid., p. 118). At the same time, the growth in consumerism and in communication and information technologies has led to an emphasis on pastiche, parody and playfulness (Lyon, 2000, pp. x–xi, 7). The new search for certainty and re-enchantment leads to an ‘inner quest’ that focuses on the self, choice and consumerism (1993, pp. 121–2). Lyon believes, however, that the affinities between the New Age and postmodernity are limited, since in contrast to the latter’s emphasis on differences, the ‘New Age bespeaks unity and harmony’ (ibid., p. 121) through a ‘sacralization of the Self’ (2000, p. 9). Contrasting the postmodern ‘plastic self’, which is flexible and malleable in responding to social situations, the New Age asserts an ‘expressive self’ that, whilst also arising in a ‘detraditionalized milieu’, asserts its own authenticity (ibid., pp. 92–3). ‘The New Age quest for experience also accents the inner life, the voice within. Religion in this case is less merely consumed, more internalized. The voice of ancient tradition or of divine revelation is muted or ignored altogether, but the inner voice is taken to be thoroughly authoritative’ (ibid., p. 94). In contrast to York’s and to Hunt’s (2003, pp. 132–3) descriptions of the New Age as an archetypal postmodern religion, the latter identifying it with middle-class urban cosmopolitans

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with the ‘means to embark on voyages of self-discovery’ (ibid., p. 143), Lyon therefore argues alongside Heelas that the New Age attempts to assert a new certainty or metanarrative at odds with postmodernity’s pluralism. Globalization theories, like those of postmodernization, have challenged dominant modernist ways of understanding contemporary societies. But whereas postmodernity is usually understood as the collapse of meta-narratives, of social structures such as class, and of Enlightenment-based ideologies of progression, many theorists view a globalizing world as instituting new dominant social stratifications and ideologies, such as those associated with neoliberalism (Beck, 2000) or McDonaldization (Ritzer, 2004). Although analyses of globalization increasingly pay attention to the heterogeneous ways in which global phenomena are implemented, or manifest themselves, in different contexts, there is still a strong sense that Euro-America acts as the centre or fulcrum in these processes. This is represented by a number of New Age studies, such as in Rothstein’s (2001) edited collection, New Age and Globalization. Here, a number of writers ask why New Age discourses or characteristics appear to be identical wherever they are found in the world. Frisk (2001, pp. 31, 39) argues that the New Age is a deterritorialized culture without ‘clear anchorage’ in any one territory, and yet flows ‘from [the] “West” to [the] “rest”’, as shown by the movement of ‘New Age charismatic leaders’ and by the fact that the ‘lingua franca of New Age is English also outside English-speaking countries’. Furthermore, she asserts that in its emphasis on ‘Self-spirituality, individualism and experience-orientation … the metavalues of New Age seem … mainly to have a firm base in Western culture’ (ibid., p. 40). Vitebsky (1995) discerns a similar process in the formulation of ‘New Age shamanism’, which he sees as unable to capture the holism of the indigenous shamanisms on which it draws. The superiority of ‘global knowledge’ that this process establishes means that local knowledges compete with each other to be drawn upon by those Euro-Americans formulating New Age shamanism (ibid., pp. 196–201), such as Michael Harner and his followers (Jakobsen, 1999, pp. 159–205; Lindquist, 1997, p. 287). These considerations of global flows of knowledge have more recently been addressed through complexity theory by sociologists for who the New Age stands as a key example (Thrift, 1999; Urry, 2003, p. 88). Such perspectives are complemented or questioned by a focus on regional developments and by views of the New Age as a form of religiosity that is not tied to a particular worldview. The former is found in Shimazono’s (1999, p. 125) notion of New Spirituality Movements and Culture to encompass the Euro-American New Age and the Japanese World of the Spiritual, since they share a common belief that they are part of a current to reform the world and evolve humanity through selftransformation. Similar attention to global–local relations are found in Hackett’s (1992) study of the ‘spiritual science movement’ in Nigeria, Heelas and Amaral’s (1994) observations on the New Age in Brazil, and Steyn’s (2003) investigation into how South African New Agers draw upon indigenous African traditions. The latter is developed in Roy’s (2004, p. 220) study of neofundamentalist Islam that he sees as marked by a ‘New Age religiosity’ emphasizing the authority of the self. In contrast to fundamentalism, Roy describes neofundamentalism as

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characterized by a deterritorialized approach to Islam and politics, resulting from the ‘crisis of authority’ inherent in processes of westernization, globalization and secularization (ibid., p. 34). Consequently, the form that neofundamentalism takes is significantly different from the local bodies of believers, led by ulama trained in traditional madrasas, that typifies fundamentalist Islam. This form of traditional religion, in which legitimate authority is publicly bounded, increasingly has been replaced by charismatic authority characterized by learning at private madrasas and by the imagination of a global body of believers (or ummah). For Roy, this is an individualized form of religion in which ‘post-Islamists’ seek to construct their own Islamic lifestyles in social contexts that have been set adrift from the certainties of the past. Paralleled by similar developments in charismatic Christianity and Jewish Lubavitch, ‘What is evolving is not religion but religiosity – that is, the way in which believers build and live their relationship with religion’ (ibid., p. 120). This does ‘not express the dilution of the self into the collective, but on the contrary mark[s] an exacerbation of the self’ (ibid., p.178). Following the work of Hervieu-Léger, however, Roy (ibid., pp. 222–5) asserts that such believers group together on the basis of self-realization and a relationship with a charismatic leader, becoming ‘New Age’ ‘sects’, ‘cults’ or ‘religions’. Although developing different theories, these macro-social accounts utilize the New Age motif in remarkably similar ways to other strands within the sociology of religion. I now bring these out in a concluding section, indicating areas of weakness that will be probed in the next chapter to provide a more solid theoretical and methodological basis for understanding phenomena normally classified as New Age. Problems in the field This discussion has identified a number of uniting features, despite different emphases and theoretical perspectives. The most important of these is self-authority. Almost unanimously, scholars have taken the exercise of, and emphasis upon, self-authority to be the common factor that allows them to group different social phenomena together as New Age and, moreover, to show how these phenomena are suited to new social contexts. The pre-eminence of self-authority is taken to accord with the nature of social life in a postmodernized, privatized, individualized or globalized world. As such, the New Age stands as an archetypal form of religion today. Indeed, this form is taken to be so unique that the term ‘religion’ is no longer applicable; instead, the New Age is seen as a ‘spirituality’.10 The feature of self-authority in New Age studies is complemented by most scholars’ attention to a common worldview, vision or lingua franca within the New Age. Clearly, the emphasis on self-authority and rejection of external authority, at least in the last resort, are seen as central components to the New Age discourse. In fact, in scholarly accounts, it seems that when it becomes too difficult to assert the existence of a common worldview, such as when the phenomena being considered appear too multifarious, then self-authority is emphasized as the common, binding feature of the New Age or of spirituality. It is important to note the evolutionist current running through this theoretically postulated shift to the self, exemplified by Bellah’s article ‘Religious evolution’:

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‘The historic religions discovered the self; the early modern religion found a doctrinal basis on which to accept the self in all its empirical ambiguity; modern religion is beginning to understand the laws of the self’s own existence and so to help man take responsibility for his own fate’ (1969 [1964], p. 288; my emphasis). This evolutionism is as strong forty years later, especially given Bellah’s influence on Heelas. Heelas and Woodhead’s (2005) view of the replacement of ‘life-as religion’ with ‘subjective-life spirituality’ appears almost as a sociological justification for the shift, articulated in the New Age worldview, from a Piscean Age dominated by institutionalized religions to an Aquarian Age of individual spirituality. Yet this is not a new development in sociological thinking: arguably, evolution towards selfauthority runs through classical sociological accounts of modernization, as in Weber’s (2001 [1904-1905]) analysis of the self-sufficiency of ascetic Protestants, inextricably linked to increasing rationalization, and Durkheim’s notion, also influential upon Heelas, of the rise of the cult of man, inextricably linked to increasing individualism (see Heelas, 1996c). Hervieu-Léger’s (2001) account of the historical development of modes of validation indicates further evidence of evolutionism today. The New Age motif in today’s sociology of religion also draws upon a scholarly discourse about mysticism and occultism that coalesced in the 1970s as a response to new religious movements, particularly utilizing Troeltsch’s (1931) notion of mystical religion (see Campbell, 1978; Garrett, 1975). As an extension of the Weberian typology of forms of religion in terms of church and sect, Troeltsch’s ideal type covered non-institutionalized, individualized, emotive religion, which he saw as particularly attractive to the educated middle-classes. Campbell’s (1972) notion of the ‘cultic milieu’, which developed this perspective, became especially influential, although he saw the concept of mysticism as having limited heuristic value because of its linkage to Christian contexts, as Rigby and Turner (1972) also point out in their study of the Findhorn community. The shift in authority to the self is therefore linked to detraditionalization. Although in some accounts this takes the form of a radical post-traditional order, most scholars recognize the continued presence of traditions and institutions whilst arguing that it is the way these are treated by individuals that has now changed. Rather than dominating individuals’ lives, and thus imposing external authority, they are seen as resources from which individuals draw by exercising self-authority. In this respect, there is little difference between Heelas’s description of the sovereignty of self-authority and York’s notion of self-selection. The role of traditions and institutions has been explored most fully by Hervieu-Léger, Roof and Wuthnow, who, in their various ways, consider what it means to hold a faith in a situation in which self-authority is exercised and external authorities are treated with caution or rejected. Such a situation means that a variety of traditions lying outside of an individual’s faith may eclectically be resourced, as with the participants in the groups studied by Besecke, with the result that two members of the same religious organization or faith may appear quite different. The transmission of the New Age motif throughout sociological studies of religion and more widely in the social sciences is therefore based upon the particular view of the New Age established within the specific field of New Age studies itself. But in so doing, these broader discourses repeat and amplify a number of crucial theoretical

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and methodological problems that have barely been raised in the relevant literature. Theoretically, the most central concerns the distinction between self-authority and external authority. Without acknowledging that they are doing so, scholars slip from asserting that self-authority is emphasized in New Age discourses to asserting that the exercise of self-authority marks the New Age. These views leave the self and authority peculiarly un-theorized, given the prominence of sociological approaches that have directly addressed how the self is constituted or formed through social contexts and the authorities within these. To engage critically with New Age studies properly, then, it is important to go back to fundamental issues of social power and build up a more socially contextualized and plausible theory for understanding the self and authority. Methodologically problematic is the fact that this proposition of self-authority is reached on the basis of what is said or, more often, written by those identified as New Agers. Even empirical studies of the New Age can be criticized for lacking social contextualization. Interview-based studies focus overwhelmingly on attempting to discern worldviews, paying little or no attention to what people are actually doing and with whom. Ethnographic studies are open to two criticisms. Firstly, many are concerned primarily to extract and analyse the spoken and written discourses found in the field, with scant regard for the practical nature of these. Secondly, too often events are studied in isolation, without regard for their contextualization in participants’ lives or for their regularity. Both criticisms show the difference between ethnography as practised by scholars of the New Age and ethnography as practised by those investigating other fields, a difference made all the more stark when the same ethnographers compare their studies of the New Age with their studies of other fields. It is as if the New Age motif casts a spell over those who set out to study it, dampening critical sociology. In the next chapter, I expand upon these criticisms by constructing a theory of power that can act as a surer base for approaching and understanding the different social phenomena classed as New Age. Notes 1 For a comprehensive study of Christian responses, see Saliba (1999). 2 Cited by William Oddie in The Sunday Times, Style and Travel, 3 April 1994, p. 10. The same year saw inclusion of the ‘New Age Movement’ in the British government publication, Aspects of Britain: Religion (see Hutton, 1999, p. 470 n. 32). 3 For example, Pat Kane in The Guardian 2, 4 January 1995, pp. 12–13 and Polly Toynbee in The Guardian Weekly, 31 May 1998, p. 22. The Guardian columnist Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World extends this perspective by investigating ‘solipsistic New Agers seeking the “inner self”’ through a number of books influential on management consultants and celebrities (2004, p. 47). 4 For example, Elena Lappin in The Guardian Weekend, 11 December 2004, pp. 46–59. 5 For example, Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian, 12 November 1996, p. 9; Jo-Ann Goodwin in The Guardian Weekend, 7 May 1994, pp. 32–3, 35, 39; and Damian Thompson in The Daily Telegraph, 23 November 1994, p. 10. 6 For example, Gary Trotter in The Guardian, 24 June 1995, p. 25.

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7 For example, Umberto Eco in The Guardian, 19 August 1995, p. 27 and Kalman and Murray’s ‘New-age Nazism’ in New Statesman and Society, 23 June 1995, pp. 18–20. 8 Ackerman (2005, p. 509) likewise describes the marketization of religion in Malaysia, through which religious symbols are detached ‘from fixed structures of meaning’ and become commodified signs, enabling their consumption by the global middle-class. 9 Lyon’s assertion that the New Age is better described as a ‘network’ than a ‘movement’ (1993, p. 119) is abandoned in his later description of ‘multifarious New Age movements’ and, in further contortions, the ‘New Age Movement’ (2000, pp. 9, 31). 10 For overviews of distinctions between religion and spirituality increasingly purported by scholars, see King (1996) and Moberg (2002). These tend to be increasingly distinguished within the broader category of the sacred and seen as inversely related, as in Woodhead’s (2005, p. 21) assertion that ‘when religion grows, spirituality tends to decline, and vice versa’. Compare with Fenn’s (2001) discussion of the distinction between the sacred as an institutionalized and thus reduced form of the Sacred, the world of human potential.

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Chapter Three

Power, self and practice The concept of power is weakly developed in the sociological study of religion, yet it should lie at its heart.1 Concerning the nature of social relationships, power can only be understood by being socially contextualized: attention must be paid to the contemporary and historical relationships that pertain in any context. In this chapter, I aim to address the deficiencies of New Age studies by developing a theoretical scheme for interpreting the kinds of phenomena they address, so that my ethnographic account of the Nottinghamshire network can proceed on a surer footing. The first section of this chapter looks at some of the sociological and anthropological debates about power and addresses the methodological faults of New Age studies. The second explores in detail approaches to power developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. The third applies their insights in order to criticize theoretical stances in New Age studies before turning to interpretations of religion in general and to the sort of religious phenomena in the Nottinghamshire network. Theorizing power Approaching power Operationalized through a number of notions – including leadership, charisma, authority, legitimation, dominance and structure – the concept of power is central to social scientific thinking. In focusing attention on this concept, this study draws on anthropological and sociological approaches, although in general I will use the term ‘sociological’ to refer to both. Although featuring in early sociological literature through Marxian discussions about control over the means of production and Weberian debates concerning domination compared to legitimate authority, since the 1970s there has been renewed interest in conceptualizing power. This has attempted to move beyond a view of power, exemplified by the Parsons–Mills debate of the 1950s, as either a resource that can be distributed to the benefit of all or a finite quantity that some possess and others do not. Lukes’s influential Power: A Radical View (2005; 1st edn, 1974) addresses hidden, covert forms of power in social relations, by adding a third dimension to sociological debates. What he calls the one-dimensional view builds up a picture of power from analysis of overt decision-making, ignoring more subtle forms of influence and coercion. These subtle forms may be placed into two categories: cases in which one group does not allow another to make decisions or only to make them within a limited choice, and those in which one group’s choices are shaped by another’s. The twodimensional view takes into account the former category of cases but not the latter

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and thereby reproduces the error of commitment to behaviourism exemplified by the one-dimensional view, in which there is only study on overt, observable behaviour. Lukes’s three-dimensional view provides a more complete sociological perspective by focusing on who controls the political agenda, thereby enabling exploration of the difference between actual and potential issues and conflicts. As Lukes recognizes, the three-dimensional view of power raises the problem of needing to study what does not occur. Whilst Lukes (2005, pp. 48–52) provides some escape routes from this dilemma, such as studying how people behave during abnormal times when power is lessened and how they react to the few opportunities for dissension that do arise, his analysis is curtailed by a sociological approach which neglects a more ground-level, ethnographic description of behaviour (Urry, 2003, p. 111). But if attention is paid to symbolic and bodily interactions (Cohen, 1974), coupled with an understanding of how performers perceive these, then a fuller appreciation of power may be possible by stressing everyday practices in micro-settings rather than relying on a more macro-social account of periods of resistance. Furthermore, whilst Lukes’s analysis of power brings to light certain features of social interaction, it does not directly ask what power is. This is a question that writers have examined with some scepticism. Fardon (1985, p. 8), for example, addresses the question of how power is conceived or described: ‘Power as such is never directly visible, it has to be read off. But its visibility may be promoted through objectifications of power which dramatise its thing-like nature and the concomitant possibilities of localisation and possession.’ In his view, power is impossible to define (indeed, any attempts to do so ‘invite an interminable regression’) and is knowable only through metaphors (ibid.). Elsewhere, Lukes’s (1987) discussion of perspectives on power indicates that power exists only as a feature of relationships between people involving action directed towards outcomes (whether these are stated or unstated, known or unknown). In addition, as Weber (1968) explains, authority is only one form of power, since it refers to the formally recognized establishment of outcomes resulting from social relationships, in other words to legitimate domination. Importantly, Lukes’s analysis shows that, as a result of people’s diverse interests even within the smallest groups, power is not an entity that points in one direction, but gives rise to a variety of outcomes and interpretations of these. This means that different people use different strategies and resources to pursue different outcomes, even in the same social setting. It is therefore important to pay attention to the means by which people resource and direct their actions, for this influences how power is shaped in social context. By paying attention to these means, a Marxian social perspective enriches the Weberian perspective on power. This conceptualization of power can be defended against those who advocate its abandonment as a concept. Minson (1986, p. 129), for example, argues that because power is not a cause of any outcome, the concept of power should instead be replaced by conceptions of ‘differential advantages (or disadvantages) regarding the possibility of social agents being successful in realizing certain objectives … determined by specific discourses and social relations in which they are formed and where they exercise definite, albeit limited effects’. Yet the concept of power is useful precisely because it refers to the complexity of such differentials: Minson’s notion of ‘discourses and social relations’ covers too diverse a range of phenomena to be

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adequately bracketed together without the use of a specific sociological concept. Similarly, Riches (1985) criticizes understandings of power for replicating agents’ own models of action in terms of their richness or poverty in resources. This is not, he believes, an objective sociological explanation of action that would seek to show why actions are performed by focusing upon agents’ subjective appreciations of their intentions, interests and strategies. Such an approach would avoid the ‘gross reification’ involved in assumptions that an ‘objective arrangement of classes’ forms part of people’s knowledge of their situations, influencing their intended outcomes (ibid., pp. 97–8). Riches’s interactionist approach, however, atomizes individuals by downplaying group agency and the way in which individuals are formed as classed (and gendered and racialized) agents through patterns of dominance. This classing results in people interacting through different means: an objective sociological account surely has to look beyond subjective understandings of the world, although by relating agency and structure it does not have to entail reification, as Riches suggests. It is precisely the desire to conceptualize power beyond these dichotomies that interests Bourdieu and Foucault. Beyond objectivism and subjectivism Lukes’s analysis of power highlights the subtlety by which agendas and compliance are established, pointing in the direction of the need to consider the means and performances of social interactions. This draws us away from the political machinations of power, which dominate his and others’ writings, towards ongoing quotidian social relationships as these are structured in unequal distributions of resources. The work of Bourdieu and Foucault has particularly addressed such relationships, whilst linking them to broader structures of power and social change. As such, they have influenced the relationship between sociology and anthropology, since their work shows how sociologists’ concerns with history are equivalent to the cross-cultural comparisons of anthropologists (Fardon, 1985, p. 5). Fardon (ibid.) explains how a convergence of interests in these disciplines followed attacks on social models for ignoring power, instigated by the interest shown by Bourdieu and Foucault in criticizing the social sciences’ rigid conceptualization of power, at best, and their neglect of power, at worst. Bourdieu and Foucault reflect a shift in social theory following criticisms of Marxism for its economic determinism, periodization of history, and strong form of functionalism. Methodologically related to this are their attempts to reconcile the structuralism or objectivism typified by Marxians, and the phenomenology or subjectivism typified by those influenced by Husserl (Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 1–30, 83–4; 1987b, pp. 1–2; 1989, pp. 14–15; on Foucault, see Gane, 1986, pp. 2–3). This meant the forging of a new direction for social analysis bridging the structureagency divide. Bourdieu (despite his reticence, see Wacquant, 1993, p. 25) and Foucault (see Beckford, 1989, p. 124) continue to make use of functionalist analysis and to refer to social structure, leading to criticisms of their determinism. Bloch (1985, pp. 31–2), for example, claims that Bourdieu over-emphasizes the ability of culture to impose on people an ideological construction, whilst Gell (1992, p. 284) develops the notion of ‘frictionless thought’ to move beyond Bourdieu’s restricted representation of agency. Jenkins (2002, pp. 81–3, 90–91, 95–6) argues that Bourdieu is best seen

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as a structural-functionalist whose emphasis on social stability gives little sense of social process. Likewise, Minson (1986, pp. 137–8) criticizes Foucault’s denial of the potential for failure (or his assertion that failure is functional) of people’s strategies in relation to power (see also Turner, 1984, pp. 34, 244; Wickham, 1986, pp. 153–6). I would argue, however, that Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s notions of field and strategy, discussed later in this chapter, enable them to escape such deterministic reasoning, even if this is not always carried through in their empirical studies.2 The notion of strategy upholds agency, whilst seeing it as shaped, but not determined, by social structures. The notion of field fixes their thought within dominant sociological analysis of modernity in terms of societal differentiation or structure: there exist different fields of action which, though related, have a degree of autonomy and therefore must be distinguished from each other. Whilst this allows Bourdieu and Foucault to avoid economic determinism (whereby non-economic fields are held to be simply sub-fields of the economic) and to promote conceptual space for human agency, their commitment to Marxian themes leads them to explore forms of domination, including the economic field’s dominance over other fields. Here, however, domination is partial, multi-faceted in terms of its agents, multi-directional in terms of its interests, and always contested by resistances. A last point to note is that Bourdieu and Foucault accord importance to the body, not only as that which is both acted upon by power and used to act with by human agency, but also as a key repository of cultural and symbolic value. This helps lift analysis of the body away from phenomenological treatments of it as a thing-in-itself, which sees it only as something that is experienced by humans in a private manner, even if through the medium of social relationships. Bourdieu and Foucault instead see the body as a public object that (whilst it is also privately experienced) is only known by an individual through being inserted in social fields, with their attendant practices and discourses. Bodies should be seen as formed in everyday practices that are micro-political: for Bourdieu, bodies are moulded by class habits, for Foucault, they are inscribed by disciplinary regimes. In particular, power is seen as producing embodied agents (including their tastes, dispositions and self-awareness), rather than as a repressive force. Although these treatments of power have been criticized for casting the conceptual net too broadly, such that there can be no escape from power (Lukes, 2005, pp. 88–107, 140–43), I would argue that this is precisely the point. We should not seek theoretically to escape from the notion of power, since it is a quality of all social relations. Despite his criticism of Foucault, Lukes (ibid., pp. 64, 69, 108–10) himself later recognized that in the first edition, his study of power was one-sided, focusing on the securing of compliance to domination, whereas power should be seen in more general terms. Rather than attempting to discern where power is lessened so that spaces of freedom are heightened, sociological enterprise should endeavour to describe and analyse the different forms that power takes. In terms of the definition of power already offered, that endeavour would be directed towards the different means which resource people’s interactions with each other. It is through such Bourdieuian and Foucauldian perspectives on power that the substantive topics in the rest of this chapter are addressed. Before doing so, some comments are needed on why Bourdieu and Foucault are preferred to other theorists

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who focus on power, which is principally because they pursue an ethnographic approach that empirically grounds their theoretical reflections.3 This distinguishes them from sociologists such as Anthony Giddens and Jürgen Habermas, who touch lightly on empirical matters only as they serve the theories they are constructing, and from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who are closely associated with Foucault. Lastly, whilst Niklas Luhmann’s work may appear attractive, particularly the notion of autopoietic or self-producing social systems, his emphasis on communication severs attention from the practical discourses in which Bourdieu and Foucault are interested, rendering him unhelpful for an ethnographic approach and his theory too abstract and functionalist (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1996, p. 102; Urry, 2003, pp. 100–101). This may be seen as lying behind the theological aspects that, it has been claimed, marks Luhmann’s later work on religion (Laermans and Verschraegen, 2001).4 Given the impact of Bourdieu and Foucault on sociological thinking, it seems surprising that studies of religion have not made more use of their work, although this fits the isolation of the sociology of religion.5 In drawing on their work, it is not my aim to see their relevance solely in terms of what they can tell us about religion. Conversely, I wish to participate in pulling the understanding of religion back into the social world and thus into mainstream sociological thinking. Although I will write of the religious field and religious capital, these are not features abstracted from the rest of the social world, but are explicable only in terms of their relationship to other fields and capitals. To privilege religion’s role in society or human existence, as many in the sub-discipline have done, particularly through their construal of the sacred or transcendence, is to engage in theological reasoning that should have no place in sociological discourse. Whilst religion is being looked at, we are required instead always to keep one eye on the rest of society. Methodology Practical strategies Movements beyond an objectivist–subjectivist distinction in social theory and practice, which I now explore in detail, are basic to my criticisms of New Age studies, as I will then show. For Bourdieu, just as maps provide no account of how people may actually travel over terrain, objectivist (or structuralist) analyses present only the abstract ‘system of objective relations’ that pertain in social life and leave no room for actual practices (1977, pp. 2, 18). In particular, he warns against the employment of ‘native theories’ as objectivist models, since these are always constructed for strategic purposes by field subjects, even though they may be presented by them as objective descriptions (ibid., p. 19).6 Bourdieu does not reject objectivism, however, but seeks its transformation through subjectivist (or constructivist) descriptions of the sort pursued by phenomenological approaches: his aim is to resolve this fundamental antinomy in social science (ibid., pp. 1–9). Whilst structuralism takes into account the objective relations that exist between social agents, but not the practices in which they are actually engaged, phenomenology provides insight into those practices, but ignores their objective relations. Because both aspects are essential for sociological understanding, the two approaches need to

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be fused into a more comprehensive perspective, which Bourdieu calls ‘structuralist constructivism’ or ‘constructivist structuralism’ (Wacquant, 1996, p. 11, n. 21). Bourdieu’s approach emphasizes that practices may be defined by rules, but take strategic forms that cannot be determined in advance. It is this temporal dimension of social life that allows strategies to be developed and pursued – precisely that dimension which maps and rules cannot convey: ‘To abolish the interval is … to abolish strategy’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 6). Yet, whilst this ‘tempo’ (ibid., p. 7) of action may be described by subjectivist descriptions, alone these do not take into account the regulation of practices in terms of objective relations of status, class, ethnicity, gender and so on. Foucault’s thought follows similar lines. As Minson (1986, p. 112) explains, he criticizes Marxian accounts of power for being tied to ‘juridico-discursive’ conceptions of ideology which view consent as enforced through legitimation, thereby reducing the subjectivity of individuals to mere data over which power is exercised. This means that analyses of power should cease locating it only in terms of sovereignty and therefore within the law or the state; in a famously blunt assertion, Foucault (2000, p. 122) states, ‘We need to cut off the king’s head. In political theory that has still to be done.’ But he equally rejects the phenomenological notion of a ‘constituent subject’, grounding his analysis instead in genealogy as ‘a form of history that can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, and so on, without having to make reference to a subject that is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history’ (ibid., p. 118). So, whilst Foucault (ibid., pp. 115–16) describes himself as ‘antistructuralist’ because of his emphasis on contingent events, he asserts that all the emphasis of analysis should not fall on events, but on ‘relations of power, not relations of meaning’. His work therefore refers to structures of power, whilst avoiding their reification as in structuralist analysis. Although rarely emphasized in commentaries, his studies are concerned with documenting the establishment of bourgeois regimes of truth and are thus attenuated to issues of class power. These methodological considerations show that any understanding of social phenomena must proceed by investigating the social contextualization of embodied practical strategies. This can be pursued by any number of different methods, such as genealogical analysis, surveys or interviews, but it is especially through participant observation that the intricacies and vicissitudes of strategies can be explored. This is because there is an immediate engagement with what people are doing, rather than only, on the one hand, what people report about their practice or, on the other hand, the topics concerning practice that the researcher views as important – although such representations and theoretical orientations, respectively, remain essential considerations for all research methods. Participant observation, then, allows the sort of developing relationship with field subjects described by Barker’s (1987) distinctions between the three fieldwork stages of passivity, interaction and activity. I will now develop methodological criticisms of New Age studies before turning, in the next section, to a fuller consideration of Bourdieuian and Foucauldian approaches.

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Folk models in New Age studies These methodological considerations immediately highlight the inadequacy of studies that construct an analysis of the New Age upon a model of people’s beliefs, without contextualizing these in people’s practices. As conflations of several folk models, an academic procedure that Bourdieu (1987b, pp. 9–12) criticizes, these accounts fall into two traps. Firstly, they rest upon the discourses, beliefs or worldviews of those considered by the analyst to be New Agers, to the detriment of discussing practices, in particular the contextualization of practices in terms of strategies, their tempos and their regulation.7 Secondly, they paint a picture of coherence that is applied as a model to all those elements that the analyst discerns as bearing discourses that relate to this folk model. One consequence of the first trap is that the meanings of beliefs are assumed, rather than interpreted in terms of their social contexts of production, utilization and contestation.8 The last chapter showed how scholars analyse the New Age by constructing its worldview or lingua franca primarily on the basis of published authors. Whilst these are then supplemented by analysis of the worldview’s affinity to secularization, modernity or postmodernity, they appear similar to self-professed New Age handbooks themselves (see Wood 2003, pp. 162–5). Heelas’s early and middle phases focus upon texts, as in his analysis of the Californian self-religion Kerista through its journal (Heelas, 1982) and his reliance upon the writings of William Bloom and Louise L. Hay, especially, in describing the New Age Movement (Heelas, 1996b). The diversity of insiders’ texts that Heelas draws upon are not interpreted contextually, but simply juxtaposed in lists that aim to illustrate his points. In a review of Heelas’s The New Age Movement, Dawson (1997, p. 392) complains that, ‘The range of material covered is so vast … that too often the analysis itself dissolves into a litany of names, places, events, books, therapies and so on’.9 Likewise, Waterhouse (1999, p. 104) points out that studies of the New Age too often use the term ‘as a “catch-all” term to incorporate diverse contemporary religious manifestations which deserve separate recognition’. Even Heelas and Woodhead’s (2005) empirical study of religion in Kendal presents very little evidence about practices in the holistic milieu, except for a few comments by interviewees on experiences which, moreover, give little account of the manner or social contexts of their practice. This provides a thin and unsatisfactory grounding for their grand claims that religion is beginning to be replaced by spirituality, even notwithstanding the theoretical problems associated with their pronouncement of the shift to self-authority, which I will discuss later in this chapter. A stark example of this objectivization is York’s wholesale adoption for his description of the New Age and neo-pagan movements of Marilyn Ferguson’s (1981) conclusion that what she describes as the Aquarian Conspiracy takes the form of a network of networks, in a book that, as we have seen, York (1995, p. 330) actually describes as a ‘virtual handbook for the New Age movement’. Similarly, studies based upon interviews focus almost entirely upon interviewees’ beliefs, rather than addressing their practices. Steyn (1995, pp. 19–21) complements her study of South African New Agers’ worldviews with a survey of literature chosen by an editor of the magazine from whose advertisement pages her interviewees are contacted. Whilst she uses ethnography to provide a basis for her discourse-based method, explicitly this is not to gather data but merely to ‘imbibe the atmosphere of

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the groups’ (ibid., p. 19). Similarly, whilst Bloch (1998, p. 11) conducted fieldwork for 18 months, his analysis of New Age and neo-pagan spirituality is based almost entirely on interviews about their beliefs, with little discussion of the social context of interviewees’ lives, including their religious practices. This is particularly odd given that one of his aims is to investigate perceptions of community. Interestingly, Bloch reports that many of his interviewees gossiped during interviews, since they knew each other, yet he explicitly refuses to include this in his discussion despite the fact that it would provide valuable quotidian evidence concerning community. Other studies emphasizing practice and embodiment also tend to revert to texts and reported accounts. Ivakhiv’s (2001) study of the embodied experience of New Age pilgrimages rests almost entirely on published textual accounts, and includes surprisingly little data from his interviews. Corrywright’s (2003, p. 10) intended focus on ‘multiple networks that are woven like webs and are substantively located and defined primarily by practices’ gives a better sense of these issues. However, the primary use of a questionnaire provides little adequate grounding for his conclusions, which tend merely once more to repeat assertions of self-authority (ibid., pp. 175–6). It is to ethnographic studies that our attention should turn for some possible insight into social practice in the New Age, but these also disappoint. Danforth’s and Brown’s studies of New Age practices fail to address the practical issues raised by Bourdieu and Foucault. In sharp contrast to his long-term detailed and contextualized study of ordinary participants in Greek firewalking rituals, Danforth’s (1989) study of New Age firewalking in the United States focuses principally on the discourses of its leaders, including their talks during the firewalks in which he participated. Whilst there are sketches of other participants, there is little exploration of the role or significance of this practice in their lives. Nor is this discussed in Brown’s (1997) study of channelling events, which focuses instead on channellers’ discourses – again in contrast to his earlier ethnographic work on shamanism. In Foucault’s terms, their studies of the New Age locate everything on the level of the event, which is curious given the criticism this procedure would invoke in their other anthropological fields of study. These studies therefore rest upon an analysis in terms of participants’ (especially leaders’ and authors’) folk models of their worldviews and experiences, which explains the identical conclusion about the primacy of self-authority reached by these ethnographers, interviewers and text-based scholars. Sutcliffe’s groundbreaking genealogical study of the New Age taxon provides a more contextualized approach by directing attention to the production and consumption of texts, which is invaluable for tracing popular uses and adaptations (2003b, p. 20). This, however, begins to dissolve in the ethnographic part of his book, which relies mostly on impressionistic accounts of fragmented events, such as healing fairs or the experience week at Findhorn. Again, this lacks the sort of social contextualization in participants’ lives or wider networks that would deepen sociological understanding, although the chapter devoted to the Unit of Service meditation group is more informative. This highlights a potential weakness of Foucauldian approaches: their emphasis on textual and programmatic discourses rather than the implementation and reshaping of these. By stressing an ‘ethnography

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of readership’ Sutcliffe (ibid.) largely avoids this in his historical analysis, but is less successful in doing so in his fieldwork. The one ethnography that focuses on practical social contexts is Prince and Riches’s (2000) study of the Alternative Community in Glastonbury. Asserting that radical individualism lies at the heart of New Age communitas, they highlight the egalitarian nature, lack of social differentiation and emphasis on individual autonomy in the practical activities of the Community. The nature of their account, however, downplays the way in which practical contexts and people’s self-understandings are constructed and contested through social interaction and authority. Instead, they posit an essence of the Community in terms of its communitas, and explain that those who join the Community are already predisposed to the individualism experienced through this. But this also neglects contestations and engagements between religious identities and practices, such as relating to Christianity and paganism (Bowman, 2000).10 Although there may well be certain ethical discourses and ritualized experiences that relate to individualism and communitas, paradoxically it is the quality of Prince and Riches’s ethnography that shows these to be undermined in many important practical instances (as they sometimes recognize), such as the position of women (2000, pp. 128–9), work (ibid., pp. 133, 142), and children’s upbringing (ibid., pp. 164–5). To the extent that there is a folk model of individualism, these sorts of instances should lead to analysis of the authorities that shape, reproduce and contest it. Prince and Riches, though, seem to assume that all Community members are equivalent actors who engage with each other on equal terms. Another consequence of this first trap into which New Age studies fall is that those whose folk models are adopted tend to be people with resources of time, money and skills, able to publish books or journals, write pamphlets, lead workshops or deliver lectures. Instead, we should seek to consider these official or legitimated discourses in terms of how they are utilized and contested by ordinary people – and indeed by their producers themselves, who should not be assumed simply to be embodiments of their discourses. Furthermore, we should be wary of identifying folk models that are not based upon ‘our inferences of people’s knowledge solely on what they, in the course of their everyday life, make available to us’ (Milton, 1981, p. 155). Reliance upon interviews or texts alone gives little sense of what people ordinarily find important in their selections, stresses and interpretations. Interviews and questionnaires force people to frame their thoughts in unusual ways or set them tasks they would not necessarily encounter (ibid., p. 138). The assumption of coherence, the second trap of the objectivization of folk models, results in descriptions of the New Age, New Age Movement, holistic milieu, and so on. Looser descriptions of the New Age as a network (Sutcliffe) or as a number of wings (Heelas), articulate the notion of some essential commonality – wings do not flap on their own, after all, but require a central power. The contortions required to treat such diverse phenomena as a coherent whole are readily apparent (even without explaining his various abbreviations) in York’s conclusion regarding how they can be sociologically understood (1995, pp. 330–31; my emphasis): If the SPIN of SPINs concept is combined with the church–denomination–cult–sect typology as a special application within the SMO, i.e., the RMO, – one expanded through

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the contributions of Wallis, Stark and Bainbridge, Bird, Lofland and Richardson, etc. – to analyze formations, changes and transformations among the NRMs and cells or segments which constitute the reticulate polycephalous structure comprising the holistic movement, we have a viable sociological tool which is applicable to contemporary late twentieth century developments and study.

Sutcliffe’s genealogical approach provides one way out of this impasse, by stressing heterogeneity, but his focus on the New Age taxon still provides no convincing reason why such diverse social phenomena should be grouped together as New Age, since, even if this taxon is dominant in the Findhorn community and groups focused on Bailey’s writings, it is less clear that it is so amongst the host of other organizations and practices that he draws into his ‘series of social networks’ (2003a, p. 8). As shown in the last chapter, it is really the notion of self-authority that is central to academic views of the coherence and distinctive nature of the New Age, whether this is seen in terms of a movement, network or genealogy, and so it is to this issue that I now turn. Power and the self As this discussion of methodology has shown, Bourdieu and Foucault are particularly attuned to the practical nature of social life and how practices are shaped by discursive frameworks, in what can be called practical discourses. This practical orientation in their methodologies means that they are especially interested in embodiment, reflecting a broader shift in the social sciences from the 1970s (Van Wolputte, 2004). Anthropology began to turn from linguistic to embodiment models, influenced by Mary Douglas’s (1973 [1970]) work on the relationship between social structure and body symbolism, and Victor Turner’s (1995 [1969]) on ritual performances. These accounts, however, retained much of the methodology of linguistic structuralism, influenced by the legacy of Durkheim, and largely neglected subjective bodily experiences, although Turner later began to consider this in his study of pilgrimage (Turner and Turner, 1978). Similar developments followed in sociology and religious studies, but these now emphasized meaning rather than social structure (Davies, 1984; Gill, 1987; Mellor and Shilling, 1994; Tyson, Peacock and Patterson, 1988). A more promising approach can be drawn by emphasizing the body and its symbolism in practice, that is, not simply in terms of subjective meanings of performances, but of the structural disciplining and dispositioning of experiences of bodies and tastes, especially in terms of class. Importantly, this connects bodily practices with the self, the constitution of which is related to subjective experiences and reproductions of power structures. To develop these ideas, I will first focus upon Foucauldian theory concerning subjectification, then Bourdieuian theory regarding habitus, capital and field. Foucauldian approaches Subjectification Focusing on how the exercise of power constitutes subjectivity, through a process of subjectification or subjection (assujetissement), Foucault requires analysis of power to be tied to analysis of knowledge, since it is through

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knowledge that subjects are formed – hence his notion of ‘power/knowledge’ (pouvoir/savoir) (Minson, 1986, pp. 112–13).11 His genealogical studies therefore describe the operations of regimes of power involving particular knowledges, such as concerning health, law and sexuality. Rather than being deterministic or repressive, these regimes involve the exercise of power in everyday life, establishing practical possibilities that produce subjects, particularly in disciplines of the body (Foucault, 1980, pp. 55–62). According Mageo and Knauft (2002, p. 4), ‘power-as-episteme and power-as-agency’ are seen by Foucault as two poles of a continuum: regimes of truth always involve the agency of the individuals caught up in them. Consequently, practices must be considered in terms of their effects rather than their meanings (Foucault, 1980, p. 87). Through these regimes, people come to know themselves and each other in socially contextualized terms of truth and right, so that we must enquire, ‘what rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth?’ (ibid., p. 93). Such regimes, however, are the outcome of heterogeneous interests and objectives, leading to different strategies, technologies and apparatuses, and thus complex ‘mechanisms of power’ (ibid., p. 51). The bourgeois domination achieved through various regimes of power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which forms the bulk of Foucault’s investigations, does not therefore result from impositions by a dominant (bourgeois) class on a dominated (proletarian) class, but from the establishment of various strategies, each of which ‘fixes, reproduces, multiplies and accentuates existing relations of forces’, such that one class, as a result of its ‘premeditated tactics operating within … grand strategies … thereby finds itself in a ruling position’ (ibid., p. 203). These strategies are not ideological concoctions designed to subjugate, but result from the agency of diverse bourgeois actors responding to ‘urgent need[s]’ of ‘strategic imperative’, in part arising from the growth of a mobile population during this period (ibid., p. 195). Whilst Foucault’s study of regimes of power has received some attention by sociologists of religion, they have barely touched upon his later thoughts on what he termed governmentality (Beckford, 2003, p. 184).12 Referring to governmental rationalities, this addresses the ‘conduct of conduct’, how conduct, including selfconduct, is shaped, guided and affected (Gordon, 1991, p. 2). Foucault (2000, pp. 219–22) identifies a process of the governmentalization of the state in Europe since the eighteenth century, through the formation of apparatuses of policing (in the broad sense of the term), although this complemented rather than replaced the disciplining regimes that he had previously focused upon. By gaining intimate knowledge of individuals, policing became the fullest manifestation of Christian pastorship, leading to the individualization of the modern state’s population and thus teaching people how to recognise themselves as subjects (ibid., pp. 326–48). The common application of this ‘government of individualization’ means, however, that modern societies are marked by ‘both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power’ (ibid., pp. 330–32). Freedom These concerns have been developed most fully by Nikolas Rose in his studies of the genealogy of subjectivity in liberal democracies, summed up in the following passage (1999a, p. 11):

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Possession, Power and the New Age Through self-inspection, self-problematization, self-monitoring, and confession, we evaluate ourselves according to the criteria provided for us by others. Through selfreformation, therapy, techniques of body alteration, and the calculated reshaping of speech and emotion, we adjust ourselves by means of the techniques propounded by the experts of the soul. The government of the soul depends upon our recognition of ourselves as ideally and potentially certain sorts of person, the unease generated by a normative judgement of what we are and could become, and the incitement offered to overcome this discrepancy by following the advice of experts in the management of the self.

Rose’s Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self enquires into the development of practical discourses in social domains such as work, warfare and families in liberal democracies, through a sociology of the social and political role of scientific knowledge, a sociology of subjectivity in terms of the social shaping of human subjects, and a sociology of political power (1999a, pp. xiii–xxiii). In particular, he focuses upon the discourses and human technologies of what he calls the ‘psy disciplines’, ‘the heterogeneous knowledges, forms of authority and practical techniques that constitute psychological expertise’, adopted by professionals and experts in these diverse ‘domains of action’ (1999b, pp. vii, 264). He sees this as part of the continued secularizing and governmentalizing from the nineteenth century, regarding that ‘folding of authority into the human being’ formerly undertaken in a religious mode (1996a, p. 310). Rose therefore also builds upon Foucault’s (1988) interest in technologies of the self, which explores the pagan and early Christian practical discourses through which individuals acted upon themselves in order to achieve knowledge about themselves. Whilst ‘Christianity substituted the idea of a self which one had to renounce … for the idea of a self which had to be created as a work of art’, in today’s ‘Californian cult of the self, one is supposed to discover one’s true self, to separate it from that which might obscure or alienate it, to decipher its truth thanks to psychological or psychoanalytic science, which is supposed to be able to tell you what your true self is’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 362). This interest extends Foucault’s (ibid., p. 49) genealogical exploration into ‘the historical ontology of ourselves’ that addresses the following questions: ‘How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?’ Rose’s studies confirm the Foucauldian emphasis on understanding humans in terms of practices and techniques, rather than, on the one hand, solely social processes, in order to avoid sociological reductionism and, on the other, purely textual accounts, in order to avoid a simple history of ideas (1999a, p. xvii; 1996b, p. 128). The ‘history of subjectivity’ is thereby not seen as ‘singular and epochal’, as it is in ‘sociologies of the self’ such as Ulrich Beck’s and Anthony Giddens’s emphases on detraditionalization, reflexivity and risk, but as having its own history which is non-linear and non-unified (Rose, 1996a, p. 295; 1999a, p. xvii; Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994). Rose therefore problematizes the notion of ‘self’: far from having an essential form, even one that can change throughout history, there are plural forms of selfhood such that ‘self’ itself does not play a central role in the history of subjectivity.

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Rose (1999b, p. 10) has developed his position to consider more fully the ‘genealogy of freedom’, since ‘ideas of freedom have come to define the ground of our ethical systems, our practice of politics and our habits of criticism’. This does not mean that coercion and constraint cease to exist in ‘the government of our present’, but ‘to suggest that certain values and presuppositions about human beings and how they should live, values and presuppositions given the name of freedom and liberty, have come to provide the grounds upon which government must enact its practices for the conduct of conduct’ (ibid., pp. 10–11). Freedom, then, is not the unleashing of fetters restricting individuals or selves, but ‘a mode of organizing and regulation … a certain way of administering a population’: people ‘have to be made free’ (ibid., pp. 64–5). Central to making a ‘free society’ is the transformation of practices ‘to inculcate certain attitudes and values of enterprise’ (ibid.). Marketplace consumption creates a new relationship between the self and the world of goods (including services, jobs, marriage partners, and so on), whereby people are ‘obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice’, and where choices are seen as realizations and expressions of the individual, leading to a ‘new ethic of self-conduct’ (ibid., p. 87). Rose (ibid., pp. 139–40, 165) describes this situation, in which there is ‘a new regime of the self’, as advanced liberalism. One of its central characteristics is the proliferation of expertise, no longer in ‘centrally directed bureaucracies’ but accessed ‘indirectly via the mass media or directly through therapeutic encounters’ in a market of professionals of lifestyle choice, where individuals become ‘protoprofessional[s]’ themselves, that is, experts in redefining their everyday choices and troubles as amenable to treatments by one profession or another (ibid., pp. 87–8). One consequence has been the growth of the therapeutic, a ‘cluster of technologies for the government of the autonomous self: those associated with the “psy” knowledges of human individuals, groups and the determinants of conduct. The significance of psychology within advanced liberal modes of government lies in the elaboration of a know-how of the autonomous individual striving for self-realization’ (ibid., pp. 89–90). Expertise therefore ‘enters into the passions of individuals and populations and shapes the values and demands of countless contestations “from below”’, it is ‘“repossessed” as a demand that citizens, consumers, survivors make of authorities in the name of their rights, their autonomy, their freedom’ (ibid., p. 92). Critical remarks Writings on governmentality have uncovered an area of study of great potential for the sociology of religion, for its emphasis on the constitution of self-autonomy in a marketplace context of the proliferation of authorities, experts and professionals, has clear implications for understanding secularization and religious pluralization. They have, however, received significant criticism and it is by addressing these that the salience of the Bourdieuian approach to practice can be appreciated. The main criticism is that by focusing upon texts and discourses, the practical implementation and potential consequent alteration of governmental programmes is neglected (Brownlie, 2004; O’Malley, Weir and Shearing, 1997). Rose (1999b, p. 19) states explicitly that ‘analyses of governmentalities are empirical but not realist. They are not studies of the actual organization and operation of systems of rule, of the relations that obtain amongst political and other actors and

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organizations at local levels and their connection into actor networks and the like.’ In other words they ‘are not sociologies of rule … [but] studies of a particular “stratum” of knowing and acting. Of the emergence of particular “regimes of truth” concerning the conduct of conduct … Of the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses and devices for exercising power and intervening upon particular problems’ (ibid.; my emphasis). Despite Rose’s (1999b, pp. 275–6) defence that his approach is genealogical not sociological, there are three problems with his perspective. Firstly, it curtails analysis, bracketting out the actual consequences of these regimes, which surely cry out for empirical investigation. At times, Rose (ibid., p. 129) cannot help but raise this issue, as in his acknowledgement of, but little further comment upon, the ‘ambiguous results’ of ‘“maternalist” social policies’ in the United States. Secondly, it denies the possibility of feedback from examples of implementation into the formation and adjustment of programmes. Technologies of power do not simply emanate from experts, since the boundaries of who is or is not an expert may be ambiguous and because experts seek to learn from the implementation of their programmes. Rose’s approach is in danger of objectifying experts and technologies, reifying them as distinct from the actual effects of the practical strategies they help construct. A third problem is that by eschewing empirical study of these effects, it is difficult to comment upon the different ways in which people utilize or are excluded from these technologies. Abilities to respond are, however, affected by the means or resources which people can draw upon, these being structured in terms of class, gender, ‘race’ and so on, with the result that selves are shaped differently across the population. This issue can be addressed by turning to Bourdieu’s work. Bourdieuian approaches Habitus, capital and field Whereas Foucauldian genealogical studies investigate the heterogeneous histories of regimes of truth that establish the possibilities for agency, Bourdieuian sociological studies address the reproduction of ways of being that establish the possibilities for lifestyle.13 Bourdieu established his theoretical framework early in his career, based upon ethnography in Algeria, later elaborated in his empirical studies of class in contemporary French society. Here, I will discuss his concepts of habitus, capital and field, before moving on to an analysis of self and lifestyle. Bourdieu focuses on how social action is regulated through people’s dispositions to act and think in certain ways. Dispositions are ‘inculcated in the earliest years of life and constantly reinforced by calls to order from the group, that is to say, from the aggregate of the individuals endowed with the same dispositions, to whom each is linked by his dispositions and honour’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 15). More precisely, this involves a set of dispositions or habitus: ‘structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules’ (ibid., p. 72). Regulated action can only take place, however, through the use of strategies (which may be more or less predictable, but are strategies nevertheless) described

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by Bourdieu (ibid., pp. 2, 8, 15) as ‘ripostes’, ‘countless inventions’ and ‘necessary improvisation[s]’, allowing people to develop ‘practical mastery’. Such mastery fits the logic of the situation and it is this, rather than the map or ‘filing-cabinet’ of rules that structuralist analysts construct in an attempt to describe practice, which forms the ‘logic of practices’ (ibid., pp. 11, 14). As the locus for the inculcation of dispositions and ensuing improvisations, the body is central for Bourdieu: he adopts the concept of habitus in part from Mauss’s (1979 [1934]) cross-cultural essay on techniques of the body. The habitus thus represents ‘internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class and constituting the precondition for all objectification and apperception’, relating to a cognitive ‘world-view’ and to corporeal manners of acting (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 86; more simply habitus can be defined as ‘embodied class’, Bourdieu, 1984, p. 437). In this way, people’s senses of self result from the way they ‘invest their vision of the world, their projects and their hopes’ in these structures (Bourdieu, in Wacquant, 1993, p. 30). Bourdieu (1977, p. 95) explains that whilst a group’s habitus engenders all its individuals’ thoughts, perceptions and actions that are consistent with the particular conditions in which that habitus is constituted, the freedom afforded by strategic action is neither ‘a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings’ nor ‘a creation of unpredictable novelty’. Strategies therefore arise from ‘a habitus objectively fitted to the objective structures’ (ibid., p. 73 n. 2). The resulting variations across a group’s habitus are thus homologous, such that a habitus contains ‘diversity within homogeneity’ (ibid., p. 86). As Bourdieu (ibid.) states, each individual system of dispositions may be seen as a structural variant of all the other group or class habitus, expressing the difference between trajectories and positions inside or outside the class. ‘Personal’ style, the particular stamp marking all the products of the same habitus, whether practices or works, is never more than a deviation in relation to the style of a period or class so that it relates back to the common style not only but its conformity … but also by the difference which makes the whole ‘manner’.

However, it is important to point out that habitus is not a cause of social action: ‘it does not constitute a stimulus which conditions how we must behave’ (Robbins, 2000, p. 29). Someone’s choices cannot be inferred from their habitus, a position that Bourdieu parodies in the following manner: ‘Why does someone make pettybourgeois choices? Because he has a petty-bourgeois habitus!’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1996, p. 129). Instead, habitus engenders certain dispositions in people – tendencies, propensities or inclinations to act in certain ways or to hold certain tastes in lifestyle, which may be mapped out statistically, but which do not determine their acts or preferences. Thus, although a group’s habitus is grounded in their objective conditions so that a degree of homogeneity exists across the group, no individual’s practices can be deduced from knowledge of these conditions or their group habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 78–80). According to Wacquant (1996, pp. 15–17), Bourdieu’s thought represents a shift in social theory from an essentialist to a relational mode of thinking, whereby comparable social phenomena (such as members of a particular class or different classes themselves) are not seen as occupying fixed, finite points in social space,

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but in terms of fluctuating ranges of space that have meaning only in relation to one another: ‘the real is the relational’ (Bourdieu, 1987b, p. 3). The objective conditions in which habitus is grounded relate to social fields, which are systems of objective relations referring to certain spheres of social action. As Skeggs (2004, p. 16) explains, power is constituted through relations between positions in a field. Thus, power involves the body because fields function reciprocally in relation to habitus, with the latter acting as the basis of the strategies practised in the former, whilst being structured and conditioned by these (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1996, p. 127). This logic of practice is embodied in the ‘practical sense’ for the ‘feel for the game’ in any particular field, such that there is an ‘almost miraculous encounter between the habitus and a field’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 66). According to Wacquant (1996, p. 17), a field is both ‘a relational configuration endowed with a specific gravity’ imposed on all agents and objects which ‘enter’ it, and a space of conflict and competition over its specific forms of capital. This relational perspective questions the concept of ‘society’ as ‘a seamless totality integrated by systemic functions, a common culture, criss-crossing conflicts, or an overarching authority’, seeing it instead as ‘an ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of “play” that cannot be collapsed under an overall societal logic, be it that of capitalism, modernity, or postmodernity’ (ibid., pp. 16–17). The concept of field is therefore preferable to the network analysis that arose in anthropology in the 1970s (for example, Boissevain and Mitchell, 1973), which, whilst also attempting to move beyond structural functionalist approaches, tended to overlook the structures of social power that inhibited action. Warning against this tendency to exaggerate flexibility, Boissevain (1973, p. xii) himself claims that people are not as free as ‘optimistic action theorists’ believe. Whilst Bourdieu addresses many different fields in his studies, the field of power constitutes his ultimate object of study (Wacquant, 1993, p. 21). Power is, in fact, a ‘meta-field’, in which other fields with their various capitals can be located (Wacquant, 1996, p. 18). For Bourdieu, there are two poles in the field of power, representing economic and cultural capitals: at the former end are located those rich in financial assets, the bourgeois, whilst at the latter end are to be found those rich in cultural assets, the intellectuals and artists (Wacquant, 1993, p. 26). This field is the site of continual struggles over the respective weight of these different forms of capital, although that is not to say that those at both ends of the spectrum do not together form a ‘functional solidarity’ of domination over all others. However, in a society dominated by economic capital the former will be the ‘dominant dominators’ and the latter the ‘dominated dominators’ (ibid., p. 23). Bourdieu therefore takes issue with the economism that restricts analysis to financial capital and seeks to explore different forms of capital in relation to different fields, in particular by paying attention to symbolic interests. Capital functions as the basis for the objective relations or structure between elements (people, groups, institutions and so on) to be found in fields, and thus the inequalities in the distribution and sorts of resources between people (Bourdieu, 1987b, pp. 3–4; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1996, p. 101). Bourdieu (1987b, p. 4) identifies four ‘forms of capital’ that act as ‘fundamental social powers’: economic, cultural, social (‘resources based on connections and group membership’) and symbolic (‘the form the different types of capital take once they are perceived and recognized as legitimate’). This means that all social life is

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inherently symbolic: rather than symbolic power being confined to certain areas, such as religion, all fields involve struggles for dominance through legitimacy and the exercise of ‘symbolic violence’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 107). On the basis of this theoretical framework, Bourdieu (1987b, p. 4) seeks to explain the various dimensions by which agents (individuals, groups and institutions) are distributed in social space. Most obviously, there is the volume of capital possessed (amounts of money, frequencies of connections, numbers of qualifications and so on), but this alone does not explain social location. Also of importance is the composition of capital, since different capitals have different weights relative to each other. Lastly, there is the dimension of the trajectory of each capital, that is, its ‘evolution in time of … [its] volume and composition’ (ibid.). These points mean that it is important to distinguish between situations and positions in social space: the former are static locations inhabited as a result of accidents of birth, but the latter refers to the dynamic taking of locations through the deployment of strategic practices, whether successes or failures (Robbins, 2000, pp. 29–30). Relationships between agents therefore defy any simple explanation, but involve the habitus of their situations, with the positions strategically taken, and with the possession, composition and trajectories of different kinds and different forms of capital in different fields. Lifestyle and self-expression The major part of Bourdieu’s (1984, p. 176) study of French society, Distinction, concerns ‘the space of cultural consumption’ and ‘the universe of life-styles’. Here, ‘practices or goods associated with the different classes in the different areas of practice are organized in accordance with structures of opposition which are homologous to one another because they are all homologous to the structure of objective oppositions between class conditions’ (ibid., p. 175). Taking a liberal view that there are ‘as many fields of preference as there are fields of stylistic possibles’, such as ‘drinks … or automobiles, newspapers or holiday resorts, design or furnishing of house or garden’ (ibid., p. 226), Bourdieu traces class tastes, but sees these as constituted through the relationship between habitus and each of these fields, rather than being ‘sovereign’ or autonomous (ibid., p. 231). One of the most interesting features drawn out by Bourdieu’s research, which is of great relevance for this book and compares nicely to Rose’s work on freedom, is the rise of the ‘fun ethic’ (1984, pp. 365–71). Demonstrating the key difference between working-class (dominated class) and bourgeois (dominant class) tastes in terms of functionality and form, respectively (ibid., pp. 3–5), Bourdieu documents the emergence of a new petit bourgeois class fraction whose trajectory heads towards that of the new bourgoisie without yet owning its capital, such that their consumption is confined to a ‘new “substitution” industry, which sells fine words instead of things’, such as ‘“residences” with “olde-worlde” names … mock luxury cars and mock luxury holidays’ (ibid., p. 365). In tending towards form rather than function, that is, by identifying with bourgeois taste and dis-identifying with working-class taste, this class fraction has replaced an ‘old morality of duty, based on the opposition between pleasure and good’ with a ‘morality of pleasure as a duty’ (ibid., p. 368). Importantly, this is linked to self-expression (ibid., pp. 367–8):

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Possession, Power and the New Age The fear of not getting enough pleasure … is combined with the search for self-expression and ‘bodily expression’ and for communication with others (‘relating’ – échange), even immersion in others (considered not as a group but as subjectivities in search of their identity); and the old personal ethic is thus rejected for a cult of personal health and psychological therapy. At the opposite pole from the ‘politicization’ which depersonalizes personal experiences by presenting them as particular cases of generic experiences common to a class, ‘moralization’ and ‘psychologization’ personalize experiences, and are thus perfectly consistent with the more or less secularized forms of the search for religious salvation. As is shown by the use it makes of psychoanalytic jargon, the modernist morality is a psychological vulgate which moralizes under the guise of analysis … Aiming to substitute relaxation for tension, pleasure for effort, ‘creativity’ and ‘freedom’ for discipline, communication for solitude, it treats the body as the psychoanalyst treats the soul, bending its ear to ‘listen’ to a body which has to be ‘unknotted’, liberated or, more simply, rediscovered and accepted (‘feeling at home’). This psychologization of the relation to the body is inseparable from an exaltation of the self, but a self which truly fulfils itself (‘growth’, ‘awareness’, ‘responsiveness’) only when ‘relating’ to others (‘sharing experiences’) through the intermediary of the body treated as a sign and not as an instrument (which opens the door to a whole politics of the ‘alienated body’).

Providing a ‘systematic answer to the problems of daily existence’ of this new class fraction, this ‘therapeutic morality is unquestionably linked to the constitution of a corps of professionals (psychoanalysts, sexologists, counsellors, psychologists, specialized journalists and so forth) claiming a monopoly of the legitimate definition of legitimate pedagogic or sexual competence’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 368–9). In fact, these positions are taken by members of this fraction through ‘reconversion strategies’ in which they have redirected their capital, gained through ‘domestic or educational training … [which] predisposed them to play the role of an ethical vanguard’ away from ‘the prestigious positions the labour market refused them’, towards ‘the interstices between the teaching profession and the medical profession’ (ibid., p. 369). Arising from the petit bourgeoisie through greater access to education and training, and greater potential for social mobility, members of this new class fraction aspire to the bourgeoisie, reflected in their tastes, whilst mostly being denied entrance and thus being caught between classes (ibid., p. 370). They ‘see themselves as unclassifiable, “excluded”, “dropped out”, “marginal”, anything rather than categorized, assigned to a class, a determinate place in social space. And yet all their practices, cultural, sporting, educational, sexual, speak of classification’ (ibid).14 The issues Bourdieu raised for France in the 1970s are therefore pertinent for today’s sociological studies of religion. Drawing upon Bourdieu and Foucault, Skeggs (2004, p. 5) states that the self should be seen ‘not as a subject position, but as part of a system of exchange in which classed personhood is produced through different technologies’. This leads to a further criticism of Rose for neglecting the different starting-points from which the self is constructed, and thus formations of class, gender and ‘race’ that differentiate whether and how people become involved with technologies of power (ibid., p. 73). A Bourdieuian perspective therefore helps contextualize the results of genealogical research. It is from this basis that New Age studies’ treatments of the self can be criticized, but first it is important to highlight a number of difficulties in Bourdieu’s work.

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Critical remarks Treating fields as relations between classes (and class fractions) in terms of legitimacy, linked to ownership of the appropriate form of capital, Bourdieu assumes that all actors in the field are equally embraced by this structure. In other words, it is worth enquiring whether fields have depth that varies across their social topography, such that some groups are more strongly involved in struggles for legitimacy than others. This depth relates to authorities and the institutions to which they are attached, but especially to the degree of conformity between these, that is, the extent to which they are active in reinforcing group habitus. This is an important qualification to Bourdieu’s theory of fields, for otherwise they tend to be presented as homogenously overlain by a different habitus for each class, embodied in human agents. It is perhaps for this reason that accusations of structuralism are so common. Instead, any field should be understood as constructed by authorities and institutions that shape habitus and establish legitimacy, but since these authorities and institutions vary in completeness, coordination and effectiveness, there is considerable variation in this shaping and establishment, and thus in the depth across the field. This qualification makes sense of Bourdieu’s liberal interpretation of what counts as a field, since different people, even from the same class, may participate to quite different degrees in the same field, such as sports, politics or literature. There are therefore also variations in the degree of habituation of dispositions in each field – although the homology between different fields means that someone’s class habitus provides them with basic dispositions in, say, the political field, it is clear that only greater involvement with authorities and institutions in this field will develop a political habitus, so that such a habitus may be more or less developed between different people even from within the same class. These considerations add some ethnographic flesh on to his approach, by demanding that we take notice of variations in actual encounters between people (within the same class and across different classes) in relation to authorities and institutions. For, whereas Bourdieu emphasizes the importance of practical strategies, much of his research contains little in the nature of ethnographic description of how people actually act. Whilst agreeing with Bourdieu’s (1977, p. 81) view that ‘“interpersonal” relations are never, except in appearance, individual-to-individual relationships’, for ‘the truth of the interaction is never entirely contained in the interaction’, it is still crucial to focus upon such interpersonal relations, just as it is crucial to extend genealogical insights by looking at how disciplinary programmes are implemented in practice. These considerations of Foucauldian and Bourdieuian approaches show the problems associated not only with academic studies of the New Age, as presented in the last chapter and as methodologically criticized in the first part of this chapter, but also the wider sociology of religion literature that draws on these studies. The lack of contextualization of data lies at the heart of these shortcomings, seen in the reversion to written and spoken texts at the expense of practices, and in the impressionistic, snapshot presentation of practices. In Bourdieu’s terms, there is little understanding of the contexts in which a habitus or set of dispositions is generated and reproduced: religious practices, strategies and beliefs need to be viewed not only in relation to their specific cultural field and its capital but also in relation to other fields of power and their capitals. In Foucault’s terms, there is little awareness of the formation,

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development and effects of knowledge, through its ties with power in disciplinary regimes operationalized through apparatuses and technologies. I now relate issues of religion to these theoretical approaches, in order not only to develop criticisms of New Age studies but, more importantly, to establish an orientation for understanding the Nottinghamshire network. In doing this, I will instrumentally use Bourdieu’s concepts alongside those of Foucault, because, notwithstanding the different approaches and emphases of each, they are addressing the same issues, namely the practical formation of humans in contexts of social power. By loosening the heuristic value of these concepts from their technical scholarly apparatuses, analysis benefits by drawing links between these approaches and emphases. The self, authority and religion Theorizing self-authority New Age and self-authority As I have shown, the importance of Bourdieuian and Foucauldian approaches lies in moving beyond theory that distinguishes between external-authority and inner-authority or self-authority. Rather than viewing the self as constituted either through inward impulses that are overwhelmed by external authorities or through expressing itself by making use of external authorities, these approaches are interested in how social authorities are woven into the very fabric of subjectivity such that the most private, intimate thoughts and actions are inextricably and inseparably bound up with social structures. Subjective experiences of freedom and autonomy are constituted through (not merely grounded or expressed in) social authorities. Scholars of the New Age are, of course, aware of the authorities and traditions that individuals draw upon, but the development of their views along this line of thinking are contradicted by their insistence, which keeps surfacing seemingly in spite of themselves, that the self is an inwardly autonomous force separable from social authorities and structures. Sutcliffe’s view, for example, that in the Findhorn community ‘The self said to be precipitated in the soteriological process is no antinomian self, however, but a theological construct routinized through a schedule of principles and practices skillfully introduced to our Experience Week group’ (1995, p. 37; my emphasis), is somewhat at odds with his claim that each activity ‘is effectively strained through the exegetical filter of the self’ (ibid., p. 31; again, my emphasis). Despite his awareness of issues of representation, Sutcliffe rather uncritically adopts as a description and explanation Findhorn’s explicit aim of ‘self-realization’ (ibid., p. 35), more fully developed in his later work on spiritual seekers as exercising reflexivity, subjectivity and agency (Sutcliffe, 2003b, pp. 45, 178).15 This emphasis on the autonomous self is highlighted by Besecke, yet the immense difficulties associated with any theory that inserts an ‘in the last instance’ clause, as she does (2001, p. 368), will be recognized by anyone familiar with Marxian debates about economic determinism. However, as shown in the last chapter, it is in Heelas’s work that the issue of the self in the New Age has been most fully addressed.

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In his early work on self-religions, Heelas’s claim that ‘What happens in the subjective is in large measure socioculturally defined or constituted’ (1982, p. 81; my emphasis) sits uneasily next to his view that ‘The self-religions must be clearly distinguished from those movements where sociocultural institutions determine the subjective by providing meanings and techniques which take away the experience of individual autonomy or selfhood’ (ibid., p. 83; again, my emphasis). If, in some religious movements, external authorities can determine subjectivity, then it appears that a continuum is established whose other end is marked by the freedom or autonomy of the self, despite the first statement. Such a continuum is inimical to the theoretical understanding of the self this chapter develops, in which subjectivity is seen as always constituted by social authorities in full measure, but never thereby determined by these. A relevant variable here may be whether discourses in a movement express notions of autonomy and freedom or those of subjection and confinement, but in no way should these discourses or folk models be confused with processes of subjectification itself. Yet, just as Heelas mistakes a lingua franca of self-autonomy for the authority of the self over external authorities in these processes in the New Age Movement, so he mistakes discourses about subjection to Christ or the church for the authority of external authorities over self-authority in these processes in mainstream Christianity. This contrast is emphasized in Heelas’s more recent work on the holistic milieu and subjective-life spirituality, which generally eschews the New Age label so that the primacy of self-authority can be seen in more general terms within the field of the sacred and contrasted to the primacy of external authority (life-as religion, in his terms). By using the key of subjectivity to unlock this field, Heelas and Woodhead (2005) accept that we all have subjective experiences, but their contention that some lives are lived by reference to them and some are not ignores the issue of how subjectivities are constructed. Their opposition between spirituality and religion appears, in fact, as a theological, rather than a sociological, supposition. This can be seen in their lack of interest in the contextual meaning that lies behind the views amongst mainstream Christian congregations’ participants: they too readily assume to know what people mean. Discourses that emphasize ‘submission to God, Christ, the Bible and congregational instruction’ (ibid., p. 19) cannot simply be taken as the opposite of ‘a turn towards life lived by reference to one’s own subjective experiences’ (ibid., p. 3). As Beckford (2003, p. 72) notes, ‘it is common for Christians to construe their spirituality as a freely chosen expression of their “real selves”, thereby accentuating the difference from externally controlled religion’. Heelas and Woodhead’s (2005, p. 26) evidence regarding the holistic milieu paradoxically shows the presence of strong social authorities, moralities and obligations, as in the prescriptive view of the leader of a Tai Chi group that, ‘The more you get in touch with your true nature, the more peace and love you have.’ Rather than being led to investigate the way in which these authorities become embodied in social relationships and subjectifications, Heelas and Woodhead merely assume that this is not important simply because it is not part of the official discourse they uncover.16 Consequently, a folk model is allowed to sociologically structure the entire domain of the sacred, dividing it into two oppositional halves and excluding any consideration of social authorities in one of those halves. This exclusion is a recurrent

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theme in Heelas’s analyses. Kohn (1991, pp. 135–6), for example, criticizes Heelas’s neglect of social authorities in his studies of self-religions, arguing that ‘where radical subjectivism is encouraged among followers, radical authority will be exerted by their leader’. And Heelas’s focus on self-actualization in New Age capitalism does not address how, as McGuire (1990, p. 291) puts it, ‘Modern methods of workplace management often effectively disguise power issues: well-trained workers come to view social control as merely “self-control”’. Heelas and Woodhead (2005, p. 160 n. 5) respond that they are interested in what people say about their religious activities, not whether there is such a thing as the self or how it comes into being, yet their use of various writers clearly shows that they are tied to a theory of the self that goes beyond people’s representations, drawing from the work of, amongst others, Philip Rieff (ibid., pp. 78–82, 95–7). In his influential book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff (1982 [1966], p. 2) takes account of the social world’s influence on individuals by claiming that a ‘new personality’ is formed by cultural institutions which ‘bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood’. But he also claims that, ‘By psychologizing about themselves interminably, Western men are learning to use their internality against the primacy of any particular organisation of personality’, such that they are freed from the “compulsions of culture”, they lose all morality, and have no need for secrecy and deception’ (ibid., pp. 21–2). A change has therefore occurred from ‘religious man’, who seeks salvation through belief, to ‘psychological man’, who seeks pleasure through feeling and is a ‘user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use’ (ibid., pp. 24–7). This theory about the self is highlighted in Heelas’s (1998b, p. 379) criticism of Nikolas Rose for being ‘committed to a theoretical view of the self … devoid of “any essential properties” … – most notably agency, the ability critically to reflect by itself rather than simply replicating (or even just adjudicating between) that which machinates’. The misrepresentation of Rose’s understanding of agency is clear enough, despite Heelas’s positive verdict on the importance of his work, but what is interesting about this piece is what it tells us about Heelas’s own theory of the self. Heelas displays an aversion to social constructivist theories, that is, to theories that interpret human action as produced through social contexts and thus in relation to others. He views such theories only as deterministic – which, as I have shown for the work of Rose, Foucault and Bourdieu is erroneous – and thus locks the self away from sociological research. The consequence of this is shown in his studies of the New Age and spirituality, which do not allow room for a sociological understanding of the self. Heelas (ibid.) is only able to see the self as ‘autonomous’ or not, as ‘machinated’ or not, as ‘replicated’ or not – that is, as either free or determined. Thus, in The New Age Movement, Heelas (1996b, pp. 192–9) considers the role of socialization only in psychological, not sociological, terms, turning the debate into one on brainwashing, which he is then able convincingly to reject as an explanation for New Age behaviour. Although he asserts the importance of traditions as resources for self-reflection, Heelas’s theoretical stance means he is never able empirically to explore this in his studies of the New Age or spirituality. Indeed, as Morris (1994, p. 195) points out, even in Heelas’s earlier anthropological research on indigenous psychology, the

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interdependence of culture and self is explored only abstractly, without taking the crucial further step of looking at how this occurs in social practice. There is, then, a pervasive ambiguity in literature on the New Age in which recognition of the role of social authorities and traditions is offset by recognition of the self’s autonomy. Without properly theorizing the self, these two aspects cannot be related meaningfully to each other in analysis, which emphasizes sometimes the former but usually the latter. Because the New Age is seen as typifying religious trends in contemporary Euro-America (but also because some of the social theory lying behind New Age studies has become dominant within sociology at large, as the next section will explore) this ambiguity has fed through into wider studies of religion, which now also, as the last chapter showed, stress the rise of self-authority. Writers such as Hervieu-Léger, Roof and Wuthnow view the New Age as the furthest manifestation of self-authority and detraditionalization, even if they do not see it as typical of the religious field as a whole. Constructing a continuum where externalauthority and self-authority lie at each extreme, sociologists have separated religion from spirituality and thereby constructed yet another problematic binary opposition in social theory. It seems all too apparent that, far from aiding understanding, this will serve as a theoretically imposed barrier that will require attention, thus diverting attention from the contextual study of religion. Such study should, in fact, address distinctions between spirituality and religion, but only in so far as these are articulated in folk models (see Beckford, 2003, pp. 71–2). Self-reflexivity, detraditionalization and individualization The stress on selfauthority in New Age studies and its influence in the wider sociology of religion has not occurred in isolation, but may be related to shifts in social theory, in particular the view that life in late- or post-modernity (that is, roughly from the 1970s) is structurally different from modernity (or earlier phases of modernity). Here, I will focus upon the influential treatment of the self in Giddens’s work and explore some criticisms of this (see also Wood, 2004). These criticisms show that an underlying weakness of his theory lies in its abstract formulation. This in part explains the strength of its attraction to analyses of religion that also shy away from contextualized discussions of practice. Heelas’s work may be located in the sociological lineage of Parsons and Giddens, both of whom sought to analyze developments in capitalist society by looking at the development of individualization.17 As Heelas explains (1996b, pp. 120, 156–7), Parsons sees the ‘expressive revolution’ in the 1960s as a development of the utilitarian self in Euro-American culture, whilst Giddens builds on this to focus on the ‘monitoring, self-reflexive and self-steering individual’. For Giddens (1991, p. 18), this represents a radical detraditionalization process towards a post-traditional order in which social institutions become disembedded: ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts and their rearticulation across indefinite tracts of time-space’. No longer tied to traditional structures of family, work or religion, individuals are required continually to construct and work upon their self-identities, expressed through lifestyle consumption. This ‘process of “finding oneself”’ is found also in the ‘institutional reflexivity’ of late modernity itself, with both having to deal with issues of ontological security by reflecting upon risk, rather than simply, as in the

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past, having to face risky situations (ibid., pp. 2–3, 12). Whilst ‘reflexive monitoring of action is intrinsic to all human activity’, the reflexivity of late modernity differs because it arises from the ‘chronic revision’ or uncertainty resulting from the continual production of ‘new information or knowledge’ (ibid., p. 20). Giddens’s position may be compared to Bauman’s (2000) view of authority in liquid modernity and Castells’s (2000) notion of the emerging opposition between the Net and the self, but is challenged by perspectives that emphasize the institutionalized basis of individualization, as in Beck (1999, p. 9; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001) and Meyer (1987). Although Heelas is critical of Giddens’s radical detraditionalization thesis, like him he remains tied to a view of expressive individuals who merely make choices in exploring their selves by drawing upon the religious resources available to them, rather than investigating the nature of these resources’ authorities (including their institutionalized forms) that constitute subjectivity. His view of New Agers is remarkably similar to Thompson’s (1996, p. 90) description of detraditionalization as a theory that supposes that ‘individuals are obliged increasingly to fall back on their own resources to construct a coherent identity for themselves’. It is no coincidence that, like Heelas, Giddens’s (1991, pp. 70–80) research method involves an unquestioning presentation of texts that he believes lay bare the nature of late modern life, primarily self-help books, without considering how these texts are used in practice. Other lines of criticism of Giddens’s work enable an understanding of the emphasis on the self and its reflexivity more clearly. Firstly, whilst Giddens’s theory has been seen as a way to bring issues of agency into his earlier macro-social theory of society (for example Giddens, 1990), it has received criticism for its weak theorization of the self, either in psychological or social constructivist terms (see Adams, 2003; Butt and Langdridge, 2003; Cohen, 1994; O’Donnell, 2003; Skeggs, 2004, pp. 52–7). According to Adams (2003), Giddens assumes the reality of the self whilst ignoring its embeddedness in cultural boundaries (such as class, gender and ethnicity) and drawing too sharp a distinction between the self in contemporary Euro-America and in other times and places. Similarly, Cohen (1994) draws on ethnographic examples to show how any individual must be seen as having a self that is by its very nature reflexive, not merely in terms of self-monitoring but also in terms of their continual social construction (see also Ewing, 1990 and Morris, 1994, pp. 12–14). Furthermore, in contrast to Giddens’s peculiarly inward focused perspective on social processes which, in common with Heelas, eschews study of social, organizational and institutional formations, Cohen points out that selves are active agents in constituting society. For this reason, Cohen criticizes social studies (particularly of religions and rituals) that focus on beliefs, symbols and texts whilst ignoring individuals’ interpretation of these: ‘Common forms do not generate common meanings’ (ibid., p. 20). From a different perspective, Skeggs (2004, pp. 52–4) explains how Giddens and Beck not only assume that individuals in late modernity have equal access to resources, but also assume the pre-existence of ‘a self that reflects upon itself’. This latter assumption easily slips into the sort of socially decontextualized understanding of the self that proliferates in New Age studies. Secondly, theories of a break between a traditional past and a detraditionalized present marked by self-reflexivity, which underlies the view in New Age studies and

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the wider sociology of religion regarding the rise of self-reflexive spirituality and the shift away from religion, have been strongly criticized. For instance, Rose (1996a, p. 295) argues against a history of the self towards increasing reflexivity, lampooning this as ‘a new chapter to the historicist fable’, whilst Thompson (1996) argues that there is no broad contrast between traditional and modern societies because traditions continue to be re-embedded and re-moored, although in increasingly mediated forms. From a different perspective, Giddensian periodization is criticized in Campbell’s (1996, p. 164) view that reflexivity only accounts for some forms of conduct: ‘It is therefore largely only in theory that the decline of traditional sources of authority can be said to lead to a world in which the individual is entirely “reflexive” and free to choose almost any action and hence any identity’. Akin to Bourdieu’s position, Campbell (ibid., p. 165) instead views the extension of life choice, like that of consumer choice, as a function of ‘market segregation, such that diversity indicates the development of a plural society rather than a widening of the parameters of choice facing each individual’. So far as religion is concerned, Giddens’s (1990, p. 38) view that the inherently reflexive nature of late modern society means that any tradition existing in it can only be ‘sham’, has been criticized by those who point to the dynamic, reflexive nature of religious traditions (Mellor, 1993; Walliss, 2001).18 Although sociological studies of religion that emphasize self-authority or self-reflexivity do not necessarily adhere to the full extent of Giddens’s theory concerning late modernity, especially the radical form of his detraditionalization thesis, they share his view that the self is now free to pursue its exploration of itself and that the resources it draws upon are primarily aids in doing so. In addition to the criticisms of this emphasis I have previously made in this chapter on the basis of Bourdieuian and Foucauldian perspectives, this section has explored the weaknesses of its Giddensian underpinning. Not only does Giddens neglect the institutionalized basis of individualization, his theory of the self and agency is undeveloped, and his positing of a break from the past is unconvincing. In fact, as Rosenberg (2000) charts in detail, Giddens constantly shifts the ground of his arguments and avoids giving clear meaning to his concepts. It is on the basis of this critical deconstruction of New Age studies, and its association with the wider field of the sociology of religion, that a more useful understanding of the contemporary Euro-American religious field can be outlined, including the role of religious traditions and agency, and processes of individualization and self-formation. The religious field Although Bourdieu does not address religion in detail, his writings are full of religious language and his theoretical framework can be, and has been, applied to religious case-studies. In Foucault’s work, religion continually surfaces in genealogical relationship to modern forms of discipline and governmentality. In this last part of this chapter, I will address specifically how their approaches enable insights into the sociological understanding of religion, particularly through Bourdieu’s notion of the religious field, which can then be explored in depth in terms of the Nottinghamshire network analysed in the following chapters.

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Structure, legitimacy and capital Bourdieu treats religion as a specific social field, meaning that it is a system of objective relations embodied in practices arising from religious sets of dispositions (each one constituting a particular habitus) that varies from group to group. As a field, religion is a semi-autonomous arena for conflict over scarce resources (religious capital), relating homologously to other fields, which together are framed by their society’s dominant field of power. Religious capital should not be equated with symbolic capital, but seen as a specific type of capital that can take various forms – economic, social, cultural and symbolic.19 Bourdieu draws heavily on Weber’s (1966 [1922]) sociology of religion, which he sees as the foremost sociological account of religion because of its emphasis, neglected by Marx and Durkheim, on ‘the religious labor carried out by specialized producers and spokespeople invested with the power, institutional or not, to respond to a particular category of needs belonging to certain social groups with a definite type of practice or discourse’ (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 5). Thus, ‘Weber built up a veritable political economy of religion; more precisely, he brought out the full potential of the materialist analysis of religion without destroying the properly symbolic character of the phenomenon’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 36). Following Weber, Bourdieu (1991, p. 5) locates the specificity of the religious field in its ‘transfiguration of social relations into supernatural relations’. The merit of defining religion in terms of the supernatural is an unresolved issue, since it is by no means clear what the latter term includes and excludes, but one answer is to refer to personified entities, such as God, gods or spirits. The religious field therefore involves conflicts over the means by which people are related to such entities, embodied through a group’s religious habitus. This may seem to exclude practices and beliefs involving non-personified energies, but, as I show in following chapters, these are drawn into relation with personified supernatural entities in some manner or other.20 Although I do not wish to provide a theoretical hostage to fortune by formulating a definition of religion, I believe that attention needs to be paid very strongly in the sociology of religion to people’s relationships with these entities, for otherwise crucial practices are neglected. Such has been the case in studies of the New Age, which largely have missed the importance of practices of spirit possession. A further criticism levelled at my definition might be that it is substantialist rather than functionalist and is therefore culturally narrow. I do not, however, wish to assert that all societies must involve relationships with such entities, or to prescribe the form these entities must take or the places they must inhabit: their supernaturalness merely refers to the fact that they can be named (and therefore have some sort of personhood, although one that may be quite different from that which may or may not be attributed to humans in their society) and possess powers of a qualitatively different nature to humans and animals in their society (except when these are acting in tandem with such entities). Indeed, functional definitions of religion, such as by Durkheim (1968 [1912], pp. 23–47) or Beyer (1994, pp. 82–3), invariably involve substantialist elements that allow them to maintain their focus on rituals, discourses and institutions that relate to supernatural entities. Such is also the case with genealogical approaches: although Asad (1993, pp. 27–54) may view religion in terms of an Euro-American discourse, any cross-cultural comparative approach requires moving beyond such a position, as also beyond Beckford’s (2003,

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pp. 19–28) view of religion in terms of definitional conflicts at a ‘second-order’ level. The study of religion cannot be confined to societies in which there exists an explicit discourse about ‘religion’ (or equivalent terms), since that limits comparisons. To return to Bourdieu, this definition means that it is relationships with personified supernatural entities, although perhaps mediated by non-personified energies or powers, which is at stake in the religious field. Following Weber, however, Bourdieu specifies further the nature of such relationships in terms of salvation, that is, the ultimate destination of an individual’s existence. Rooted in Weber’s preoccupation with the salvation religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), this seems an unnecessary substantialist extension and one that, moreover, essentializes certain practices and beliefs in these religious traditions, contrary to much everyday religious experience such as healing (Mold, 2006, pp. 231–2). Bourdieu distinguishes between different kinds of specialists who attempt to control the means to salvation, although these do not have to be seen in such limited terms. Firstly, priests, who are associated with an institutionalized church that exercises a monopoly over the legitimization of beliefs and practices or, in other words, determines orthodoxy and heterodoxy (Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 22–3). Secondly, prophets, who are ‘independent entrepreneur[s]’ directly challenging the authority of priests and the church by producing and distributing new ‘goods of salvation’ in a sectarian mobilization of the ‘heretical religious interests of determinate groups or classes of laypersons through the effect of consecration’ (ibid., p. 24). Thirdly, sorcerors21 who are also ‘independent entrepreneurs’, but instead of mobilizing a sectarian challenge to the church offer cures to clients’ ‘partial and immediate demands … in the relationship of seller to buyer’ (ibid., pp. 24–5). For Bourdieu (ibid., pp. 31–2), the social significance of the church is that it ‘contributes to the maintenance of political order, that is, to the symbolic reinforcement of the divisions of this order … by imposing and inculcating schemes of perception, thought, and action objectively agreeing with political structures and grants these structures the supreme legitimation of “naturalization”’. Its position in the structure of the religious field is therefore homologous to the position of the ‘dominant fractions of the dominant class in the field of power’, although this does not mean that tensions and conflicts will not arise between this class and the church (ibid., p. 33). Such conflict arises especially at times of crisis which weaken the ‘symbolic systems that provided the principles of their worldview and way of life’ of entire societies or certain classes (ibid., p. 34). At these times, prophets and their sects may be able effectively to challenge the authority of the church and thus take over the means of legitimation, becoming the new orthodoxy and modifying the religious habitus of the laity (Bourdieu, 1987a, p. 126). By interpreting Weber’s sociology of religion through his own theoretical framework, Bourdieu highlights central issues that the former neglects, in terms of the relational nature of the religious field, namely the relationship between religious specialists, and between religious specialists and the laity (Bourdieu, 1987a). The latter refers to the manner in which religious practices and beliefs are as much shaped by the demands of the laity as by the theology of specialists – both exert agency.22 As Swartz (1996, p. 82) explains with regard to the laity, ‘Consumers … select from these [religious] products according to their own positions of dominance

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or subordination within the struggle for distinction among the social classes. Consumers in subordinate positions tend to select products produced by producers in subordinate positions within the field of cultural production.’ The shift to greater religious pluralization in contemporary societies does not therefore mean that only now do the laity act as consumers in a marketplace; on the contrary, Bourdieu shows us that marketplace consumption is a structural element of agency in any field, for all fields enable expressions of lifestyle. The difference now, of course, is that there may be more products on offer in the marketplace as a whole, but this does not necessarily entail a greater practical choice, because consumers do not have equal access to all products since access depends on the capital they possess. It is therefore also fallacious to assume that consumers within a greatly expanded marketplace necessarily exert more agency or authority – even if a greater range of products are practically available for consumption, we must still attend to the practical relationships that their consumption entails. One feature of such a marketplace is that there is increased awareness of the diversity of its products, resulting from greater social contact across groups and classes (which is not the same, it should be emphasized, as greater social mobility), and from greater sharing of physical spaces (as in the advertising that accompanies the emergence of the mass media, which problematizes the easy identification of target groups, thus entailing a certain amount of spillover across groups) and geographic spaces (as in religious fairs). Foucault may be usefully brought in here, for whereas Bourdieu in practice tends to apply his framework too simplistically, Foucault directs our attention to the plurality of authorities involved in practices. Furthermore, his approach emphasizes the ritualized nature of religious practices, while Bourdieu, pursuing Weber’s interest in salvation, is apt to focus on ideologies and worldviews. Since ritual is often taken to be a defining element of religious practice and the locus through which subjectivity is formed, some comments are required. Ritualization Drawing heavily on Foucault, Catherine Bell (1992, pp. 172–3) develops an understanding of ritual in terms of contestation and individual agency, in order to overcome the structuralist restraints of theories of ritual evident in such influential accounts as Turner (1995 [1969]). In Bell’s view, people involved in rituals are not a homogenous mass, manipulated through various stages with predictable outcomes, but embody different experiences, aims and strategies that can be investigated in terms of social differentiations and personal trajectories. Nor is there a clear difference between those directing rituals (its producers) and those participating in them (its consumers): there are contestations amongst the former, amongst the latter, and between the former and the latter. For Bell, this means that rituals themselves are periods of time and space involving actions that are strategically distinguishable from other, more quotidian, ones. We should therefore talk of ‘ritualization’ rather than ‘ritual’, for this ‘is a matter of variously culturally specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane”, and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors’ (Bell, 1992, p. 74). Bell (ibid., p. 80–81) also draws upon

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Bourdieu’s theory of practice to suggest that communities have a ‘sense of ritual’, so that in analysis, Confronting the ritual act itself, and therein eschewing ritual as some object to be analyzed or some subjectivity to be fathomed, would involve asking how ritual activities, in their doing, generate distinctions between what is or is not acceptable ritual. From this perspective one could not seek to construct a theory or model of ritual practice. Rather one could attempt to describe the strategies of the ritualized act by deconstructing some of the intricacies of its cultural logic.

Bell’s theory marks a substantial improvement within the literature on ritual, showing how most theories simplify what is a complex interplay of elements, but there are two important aspects of her theory that should be addressed. Firstly, in practice her approach still tends to reify ritual in that it separates ritualized situations from their wider social contexts. Whilst she focuses on the way in which a sense of ritual contingently marks out rituals from other activities, her phenomenological approach does not lead her to examine the relationship between these, nor between the rituals of one social group and those of another (Baumann, 1992). Bell’s analysis allows us to understand the process of ritualization, but not its contextual significance. Secondly, her theory points towards the view that whilst rituals mark the sharing of certain elements – such as a sense of ritual and an engagement with dominant practices, discourses and symbols – this does not necessarily mean that the participants have a shared experience. The difference here is subtle, but crucial. The common view that rituals lead to a shared experience, is articulated by Whitehead (1987, pp. 97–8): in therapy, as in ritual, a process is engendered whereby the structures of feeling and cognition are linked up to a wider, and publicly sharable, vision of reality that is existentially satisfying – and, as a subspecies of this, ideologically appealing – through the medium of symbolic formulations that ‘fit’ the deeper structures of the self while simultaneously making assertions about the world.

Whitehead’s study of Scientology explores how a vision of reality is intimately related to the group context in which experiences occur, such that in the practice of auditing, insight ‘invariably appear[s] as a validation of Scientology theory’ (ibid., p. 166; my emphasis). She also notes that intense practice is used to hasten and magnify such psychological changes (ibid., p. 230). In some contexts, however, even if discursive themes are present, symbolic meanings may not be collectively shared, with the result that diverse visions of reality may be held. A concomitant aspect is that the disciplinary nature of practices in such rituals may be less intense than in others. Bourdieuian and Foucauldian approaches are therefore valuable, demonstrating that rituals and symbols must be explored in their social contexts, rather than being assumed to exhibit essential features. In particular, the formation of subjectivity through the interplay of authorities must be recognized as taking many forms, which in Euro-American societies today involves those experts in the management of the self considered by Rose and Bourdieu. Relating to restructurings within the field of

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power, this has resulted in changes in the religious field, including specialists and laity redefining their positions and demands. Nonformativeness As I have shown, the central problem with New Age studies is that they dichotomize social power into two types of authority – self-authority and external authority – and believe that in the New Age, the former dominates the latter. Although various external authorities are seen as existing within the New Age, these are represented as largely inert traditions that the self can draw upon. It is a useful exercise to try to understand this view of the New Age in Bourdieuian terms. Here, self-authority is the capital which individuals jealously guard and compete over, by attempting to ensure that external authorities and traditions remain inert, at the same time as these are pushed into a marketplace which allows their easy availability for consumption. This capital can be seen in relation to a certain religious habitus amongst white, middle-class Euro-Americans, in which there are practical dispositions towards self-autonomy and self-reflexivity as regards the use of traditions and, concomitantly, perceptive dispositions towards eclecticism and holism. These dispositions are seen as progressing so far that the New Age (or, in broadened terms, reflexive or subjective-life spirituality) is seen as constituting a field in its own right, or at least a clearly definable area of a larger field (such as spirituality in contrast to religion, within the field of the sacred). Thus, various traditions, groups, individuals, practices and beliefs can be conceptually contained within this area and labelled. What is thought to be an academic requirement – the containing and labelling of phenomena – has been achieved, neatly. Perhaps it is this achievement in the face of overwhelming odds – for virtually all accounts of the New Age begin by describing how varied it is; how it lacks leaders, doctrines and sacred texts; how, in fact, it can hardly be thought of as a movement – that has made this discourse about the New Age so attractive, for containment and labelling is equated with understanding and explaining. This might be a neat story of scholarly triumph were it not for the inherent problems associated with the dichotomization of social power in the first place. Requiring us to focus upon the formation of subjectivity and agency in the complex interplay of social authorities, a field or sub-field marked by self-authority cannot be drawn. It could be argued that this field is marked by a discourse of self-authority or by people’s beliefs that they are acting in ways dictated by their inner selves rather than outer authorities, but we have seen that New Age studies easily slip into asserting the actual authority of the self over external authorities. Such a discourse and belief is in no way confined to the New Age or other phenomena considered to be self-reflexive. Moreover, it is apparent not only that strong, sometimes authoritarian, authorities exist in some social phenomena considered to be New Age, but that the category of New Age is itself hopelessly vague. Once this connecting element disappears, the entire edifice of a contained and labelled set of phenomena crumbles, for there is no reason for considering them in common terms. Sutcliffe has shown clearly the heterogeneity of the New Age and thus the fallacy of describing this as a movement, although his version of the self-authority theme means that he still continues to treat its various phenomena as connected, labelling them now as multiple spiritual seekers (Sutcliffe, 2003b, pp. 200–225). But these phenomena still

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exist. The groups, individuals, beliefs and practices presented in New Age studies do not dissipate just because their scholarly interpretations dissolve. It is still incumbent upon academics to attempt to understand and explain them, even if we do not equate this with their containment and labelling. It is here that my argument must move on to more subtle ground, for whilst I do not wish to contain or label the sorts of phenomena considered as New Age, I do want to describe and interpret them, and, in so doing, demonstrate how they differ from other religious phenomena. This difference is to be found neither in their exercise of self-authority, nor in the dominance of a discourse about the self, but in the involvement of relativized multiple authorities. To state this is to anticipate the following ethnographic chapters – it is not a statement that derives logically from my argument so far. For it could be that these different phenomena simply have nothing in common. Or that they constitute myriad different little religious traditions, existing as relatively confined areas within the religious field, perhaps serving slightly different constituencies. My ethnography, however, shows that what they share in common is the relativization of multiple authorities, such that no single authority (or range of authorities) exerts a formative influence within the life of a group or individual, and that participation in them comes overwhelmingly from a certain class fraction. As discussed in Chapter One, I use the term nonformative to interpret this situation. This should not be seen as a label or classification for these phenomena, for there is no nonformative religious field or sub-field. Nor should it suggest that these phenomena are absolutely different from other phenomena in the religious field, for the term rather describes a tendency towards nonformativeness, that is, towards a situation in which singular authorities cannot formatively shape groups or individuals. Similarly, churchly, denominational, sectarian and cultic forms of religion have strong tendencies towards formativeness, although multiple authorities are found within them and within the lives of their adherents. In other words, there exists across the religious field a formative–nonformative tension and when I write of formative/formativeness or nonformative/nonformativeness, I am referring to relative degrees of these. Where this tension tends towards the former, clearly identifiable religious traditions, groups and subjectivities emerge, but where it tends towards the latter, traditions, groups and subjectivities cannot be easily identified. Therefore, nonformativeness does not describe a specific area (or sub-field) of the religious field, but dispersed areas or regions throughout the religious field, where the formative influence of multiple religious authorities are relativized. It is here that my criticism of Bourdieu’s neglect of the depth of fields is relevant, because shallower regions, by which I mean those in which struggles over capital are less pronounced, arise precisely because of the relativization of authorities. Here, there is no simply describable habitus, because the reproduction of habitus requires the presence of formative authorities: referring to Wacquant’s (1996, p. 17) terminology, regions in a field marked by nonformativeness are those in which the ‘gravity’ of the religious field is relatively weak. It is not the case that a field’s gravity is constant upon all those agents who enter it, as Wacquant suggests. This weak reproduction of habitus means that these regions are also marked by agents being weakly involved with competition over religious capital, since there is little

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feel for the ‘game’ or logic of practice within the field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1996, pp. 98–9). This does not mean that people in these regions are not serious about their beliefs and practices, or that these are not important in their wider lives, or that they do not improvise and strategize. What it means is that the field is not played; in other words, the lack of a distinct habitus results in little interest in the capital contained in the field and in the struggles over this capital. This is indicated by folk models about spirituality, which people use to refer to their distance from churchly, denominational and sectarian institutions and adherents. Unfortunately, New Age scholars have adopted this folk model as a picture of these people as playing a separate game from those others, whereas, in fact, they exist within the field of those others’ game but are relatively inactive players in it. Since the New Age has often been described in terms of client and audience cults, it might be thought that the reproduction of a habitus and the struggle for capital, in short, the playing of a game, is important. Again, this is a theoretical possibility, but my ethnography shows a different picture. There are expertises and traditions (such as relating to channelling and healing) within nonformative regions, but these tend not to operate in ways that demand or require exclusive or sustained commitment from those who are interested, even from committed adherents or the experts themselves. Although these may at times be represented in exhaustive systematic belief-systems, in practical terms they tend to involve quite narrow techniques rather than the comprehensive dispositions of thought, perception and action that constitute habitus. Thus, although some people (including in the Nottinghamshire network) make their living from practising a religious expertise, this does not involve them in a struggle for capital in the religious field for three reasons. Firstly, they are involved with relativized multiple authorities themselves (and thus frequently change their techniques or their understanding of them); secondly, they recognize that this is the case for their clients and audiences; and thirdly, whilst they legitimize their own practices, they do not attempt to delegitimize others. It is important to recognize that these techniques still function as disciplinary subjectifications, but they do so neither as relatively totalizing disciplines that in themselves lead to a particular construction of the self, nor as part of a wider set of disciplines that act in unison and in reinforcing each other also lead to a particular construction of the self. Rather, despite similarities, the multiple authorities in nonformative regions of the religious field undermine one another’s subjectifications, and such relativizing results in the lack of construction of a particular religious self and habitus. Therefore, the development, practice and teaching of techniques in these regions should not be understood in terms of the role of habitus in the struggle for capital in a field. Given the recent emphasis by sociologists of religion on the contested nature of authority in mainstream religions, whereby multiple authorities and traditions are resourced by individuals, it might be thought that this situation is a general one for Euro-American religion today. But although the proliferation of authorities and availability of resources is an increasing feature across the religious field, the evidence suggests that these augment, rather than undermine, one other. For example, whilst Besecke shows how church attenders (amongst others) engage in informal conversation groups in which other traditions are present, her method of focusing solely on these groups, rather than on the other religious activities of participants,

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cannot really address the manner in which these diverse authorities affect their lives and subjectification. As with Roof’s and Wuthnow’s focus on small groups, subjectivity still appears to be shaped in broadly Christian (or other identifiable religious traditions’) terms, leading to particular constructions of self distinctly lacking for those existing in nonformative regions of the religious field. Similarly, Hirschkind’s (2002) study of middle-class Egyptian Muslims shows that despite the proliferation of authorities and access to these through such developments as sermons on audio cassettes, these tend to reinforce each other in the subjectification of a specifically Islamic sense of self. Hirschkind’s emphasis on everyday practices therefore gives a quite different picture than that provided by Roy’s (2004) emphasis on such Muslims’ New Age religiosity which asserts the primacy of self-authority over external authority, discussed in the last chapter, which was largely informed by his study of web logs. Experts in nonformative regions of the religious field are therefore somewhat different from Bourdieu’s notion of magicians or sorcerers as specialists within the religious field, because whilst these also practise techniques and relate to clients and audiences, they do so within particular specific traditions (usually esoteric or secret) within which they have been schooled (usually by a master). This schooling establishes them within a struggle for religious capital with one another that involves defences and accusations regarding legitimacy (often couched in the language of witchcraft), as studies of shamanistic and possession cults demonstrate. Although, as with any religious tradition, this schooling does not exclude innovations and improvisations that may result from involvement with other authorities or traditions, the persistence of a habitus and lineages of authority mean that there is not the relativization of multiple authorities that is found in nonformative regions of the religious field. Nor are experts in nonformative regions of the religious field equivalent to shamans, those religious specialists neglected by Bourdieu and Weber because they do not fit into typologies based upon Christian societies. Although any typological boundaries with magicians are problematic, many shamans do not just provide services for individuals, but also for communities by acting to rectify social order by reconciling the human and supernatural worlds. These issues and relevant literature will be discussed in later chapters. This description of experts in nonformative regions is also true for groups (such as the meditation group and religious fair in the Nottinghamshire network), despite their regular meetings, rituals and core attenders. Such groups and expertises are to be distinguished from others (such as in paganism, Theosophy and spiritualism) that impinge upon nonformative regions of the religious field, which, whilst also allowing the presence of multiple authorities, through the exercise of more formative authority are able to maintain focus upon a particular tradition. Rather than being concerned primarily with specific techniques, these latter groups involve a much broader range of dispositions that constitute a distinct habitus, and engage in struggles in the religious field by seeking to legitimize and delegitimize. The reason why these traditions, rather than others of a more churchly, denominational or sectarian nature, are more likely to impinge upon nonformative regions is because they allow greater room for the presence of other authorities. This allows room within them for two constituencies of people: a core of relatively committed adherents and a looser

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group of more changeable, less committed attenders, whose presence and views are welcomed. Of course, this pattern of core and marginal adherents also fits many mainstream religious groups, but the difference is that these allow little room for the exercise of unofficially sanctioned authority. Social change If some areas of the religious field are characterized by the presence of multiple authorities that have a relativizing effect upon each other, leading to a situation of nonformativeness, then it is a situation that accords with governmentality and Bourdieuian studies regarding the proliferation of disciplines, experts and techniques of the self in contemporary Euro-American societies. Rose (1999b, p. 191) points to ‘the proliferation of sites and practices for ethical self-formation’ and the ‘new multiple and fragmented field of identity and allegiance’. This multiplication of authority is different from ‘disciplinary societies’ that involved ‘procession from one disciplinary institution to another … each seeking to mould conduct by inscribing enduring corporeal and behavioural competences, and persisting practices of selfscrutiny and self-constraint into the soul’ (ibid., p. 234). Now, there is ‘constant and never-ending modulation … One is always in continuous training, lifelong learning, perpetual assessment, continual incitement to buy, to improve oneself … Control is not centralized but dispersed; it flows through a network of open circuits that are rhizomatic and not hierarchical’, in which people are ‘plugged into multiple orbits’ (ibid.). Skeggs (2004, p. 97) articulates a similar view: ‘Now we are in a period where the proliferation of difference through markets, advertising, and other sites of the popular, means that recognition of difference is a lot more difficult to maintain, to know and to see; boundaries are more permeable than in the past.’ In other words, there has been a proliferation of authority and expertise in these societies, particularly involving techniques of the self, related to market differentiation. The individualization that results from this is not therefore a consequence of the primacy of self-authority, as in historicist accounts of the rise of individualism, but, on the contrary, of the multiplication of authorities entwined in people’s lives. Yet, whilst these proliferating authorities discussed by Rose and Skeggs involve subjectifications, it should not be thought that they necessarily do so in a formative manner, as if they act in unison. In some contexts they might, but they may also relativize one another’s abilities to do so, leading to a situation of nonformativeness in which there is no reproduction of habitus or involvement in struggles for capital. This resonates with Sutcliffe’s views on the rise of multiple seeking in distinction to serial seeking in the past, especially by middle- and upper-classes. But whereas the latter involved struggles over religious capital, through the reproduction of deviant habituses related to esoteric traditions – as Verter (2003) also shows in his study of legitimacy in the religious field, focusing upon Wicca, Kabbalah and astrology – the former should be understood in terms of the lack of habitus, capital and struggle. This situation means that many people have fallen out of the game of the religious field, without falling out of the field itself, for a recurring characteristic of those immersed in nonformative regions is that they were brought up as churchgoers. Such considerations raise the issue of secularization, not in terms of social differentiation or privatization, but of the failure to reproduce habitus and thus engage people within struggles for religious capital. That very large numbers of Euro-Americans are now

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not involved in this game is demonstrated not only by falling rates of religious participation, but also by the weakness of religious dispositions (Brown, 2001; Bruce, 2002). Beyond the meta-field of power, no field has a necessary existence, but is in process of formation or dissolution. This means that, contrary to the view that fields exert a steady gravity, they are in flux and may at times bring more or less people into their orbits. Nonformative regions of fields may be thought of as those in which people have begun to fall out of such an orbit, although this does not necessarily mean that they are on a simple linear trajectory out of the field entirely, or that the field as a whole is disappearing. Crucially, the state of a field’s dynamics must be related to dynamics within the meta-field of power – thus, the partial dissolution of the religious field in contemporary Euro-America should be related to changes in class structure. Here, another characteristic of those involved in nonformative regions of the religious field can be highlighted: they tend to occupy a class position between the working- and middle-classes. Whether described as a new petit bourgeoisie, a lower middle-class, or an ultra-respectable fraction within the working-class, this is a highly ambiguous class position involving the upward shift of part of the working-class, in terms of occupational professionalization and lifestyle, but without the economic, social and cultural securities associated with such relocation. This class ambiguity is matched by their ambiguity in the religious field, for nonformative regions are also marginal areas, lying ambiguously between participation in the game of the field and disappearance from the field entirely. Looking backwards and looking forwards This lengthy chapter has been important for two reasons. Firstly, it has been necessarily to subject New Age studies, and sociologies of religion that draw upon them, to rigorous criticism, given their severe methodological and theoretical problems. Secondly, this deconstruction has been undertaken only through a constructive application of theoretical approaches, drawn primarily from the work of Bourdieu and Foucault, which has then enabled the establishment of an interpretive framework for understanding the religious field, in general, and the sorts of phenomena labelled New Age, in particular. Although I do not claim that this framework is the only useful one for understanding religion, it raises issues that are essential for any such understanding. It is upon this that the next four ethnographic chapters are founded, followed by a discussion chapter that engages with these theoretical debates in detail. Notes 1 Beckford’s (1983) call for attention to power is still relevant today. 2 On strategies, see de Certeau’s (1988, p. 50) discussion of their references to everyday ‘tactics’; on fields, see Bourdieu and Wacquant (1996, pp. 94–115) and Swartz (1996, pp. 78–82) for Bourdieu, and Minson (1986, pp. 114–16) for Foucault. 3 Asad (1993, p. 89) calls Foucault ‘that consummate ethnographer of Western culture’. 4 For elaboration on problems associated with sociological studies of religion based upon the discourse-based nature of Habermas’s and Luhmann’s theories, see Wood (2005).

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5 Exceptions include Coleman (2000), Lindquist (2006), Mejido (2002), Swartz (1996) and Verter (2003) for Bourdieu, and Asad (1993), Strenski (2001) and Turner (1991) for Foucault. 6 Crucially, through his notion of participant objectivation Bourdieu (2003) also contends that sociological research should methodically criticize its own concepts and practice. My own research into the Nottinghamshire network has led me to criticize my previous relatively unreflective use of a number of concepts, such as ‘non-aligned spiritualities’ (Wood, 2000) and ‘spiritual seekership’ (Wood, 2004). 7 Beckford (2003, pp. 5, 189–91, 207–8) draws attention to the need to address such practical, embodied issues in ‘New Age spirituality’ (or ‘spiritualities’ or ‘movement’), whilst acknowledging the lack of empirical studies. 8 On the importance of interpreting the meaning of language in terms of its social use, see Zaretsky (1977). 9 Although rightly drawing attention to the issue of the bodily therapies in healing centres in the Netherlands, Otterloo (1999) displays a similar lack of contextualization, reverting instead to lists of therapies and their typologization through official discourses. 10 Similar points regarding New Age travellers are made in Martin’s (2002, pp. 730–33) criticism of Hetherington (2000). 11 In this chapter, I use the term ‘subjectivity’ to refer to an individual’s experiences, and ‘self’ to their sense that these experiences relate to a single, unified experiencer (in other words, to self-consciousness). For Foucault and Bourdieu, such experiences – and thus a sense of self – are constituted through practical discourses, rather than pre-existing or somehow lying in an autonomous relationship to social power. Thus, whilst a precondition, ‘embodiment is not solely the source of self and subjectivity’, as some phenomenological accounts suggest (Van Wolputte, 2004, p. 259). Foucauldian and Bourdieuian approaches therefore do not attempt psychological theory, but, as with some other developments in social theory, ‘they do not focus on the question, “What is self?” Rather, they try to document how people create or maintain a sense of self and belonging and how this “becoming” is permeated with questions of hegemony and power’ (ibid., p. 261). They are therefore different from Mead’s (1972 [1934]) social behaviourist account of the self, as well as studies that assume the autonomy of self-authority (and thus some kind of inner psychological dynamic or power). These approaches do not necessarily assume the formation of a single self – it may be that different senses of self arise in relation to different spheres or fields of action, or indeed that these are then (strongly or weakly) related to each other by a broader, overarching sense of self. Nor do they assume the formation of personhood, which, as Marcel Mauss (1985 [1938]) shows, relates to a particular cultural construction of selfhood. 12 See Carrette (2000) for a religious studies approach to investigating the shift in Foucault’s thinking about religion from a sub-text of spiritual corporality to an overt acknowledgement of political spirituality. 13 Unlike Foucault, Bourdieu rarely addresses the self directly, but, applying his insights, Coleman (2000) and Lindquist (2006) do so in their excellent studies of, respectively, charismatic Christianity and Russian magi. 14 In a long list of these, Bourdieu (1984, p. 370) includes anthroposophy, homeopathy, yoga and Zen. 15 See Straus (1976) for a similar early perspective on seeking and questing in terms of self-transformation. 16 These criticisms also apply to Furseth’s (2005) contrast between different generations of Norwegian women in their attitudes towards religion and life.

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17 This is so, despite Heelas’s (1993) qualifications by describing the New Age as bearing pre-modern, modern and post-modern elements, a conflation that surely suggests the lack of heuristic value in imposing such grand theories of periodization. 18 Even though elsewhere Giddens (1994, pp. 61–3) recognizes the reflexivity of tradition. 19 Religion should not therefore be treated in non-material ways, just as Anthias (2001) argues for gender, class and ethnicity. Indeed, the last of these has received relatively little attention from sociologists of religion (Wood, 2006). 20 Ruel (2002) provides a contrary perspective, but may be accused of allowing the cultural specificities of his fieldwork study to determine the scope of more general accounts. 21 Or ‘magicians’ (Bourdieu, 1987a, p. 134). 22 Although, as Lehmann (1996, pp. 165–7) writes, this two-way flow is denied in Bourdieu’s conception of popular religion as imposed dominant culture. Verter (2003) criticizes Bourdieu’s early studies of religion in general for not displaying the sophistication of his later writings on culture, for example by treating religion more in institutional than in dispositional terms.

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Chapter Four

The meditation group This chapter is the first of four presenting the ethnography of a religious network in Nottinghamshire. It examines a meditation group that alongside a religious fair comprised two key groups in my study of the network. I discovered the meditation group through Anne, who attended an Anthroposophical group’s meetings that I frequented at the start of my fieldwork. I begin by looking at the meditation group for three reasons. Firstly, it became my main site of research – I regularly attended its fortnightly meetings for 18 months, as well as getting to know its participants at a more informal level. Secondly, through people in this group I discovered and accessed many of my other fieldwork sites. Thirdly, this group became of particular interest to me because of the hardy tension that existed between its formalization as a group and its informalization as a result of a wide variety of authorities that cut across its social space and boundaries. Thus, it was through studying this group that I began to conceptualize the religious phenomena that I was studying in terms of nonformativeness. This chapter investigates the meditation group in terms of the practices, beliefs and attitudes of its participants, rather than simply the understanding of it held by its leaders. It was led by two couples, whose life histories are explored to show the manner in which diverse authorities existed in the group. I discuss the way in which these authorities relativized each other, setting the scene for explorations in the following chapters regarding the wider practices and histories of the meditators. Practice and belief An evening’s meditation Arriving The meditation group was organized by Janet and Chris Lovell, but held in the home of Julie and Andrew Spencer. Around fifteen white people attended, with roughly equal numbers of men and women, and ages ranging from the mid-twenties to the mid-fifties. About two-thirds of these were regular attenders. Participants arrived from 7.30 pm and had all departed shortly after 10.30 pm, every other Friday evening. I will describe the events of one typical meeting, as the format did not vary during my fieldwork. The meeting described here took place about a year into my fieldwork with this group, on a March evening. I arrived at the Spencers’s house just after 7.30 pm and was welcomed warmly with a hug by Julie. In addition to her and Andrew, there were already four others there, including the Lovells. I greeted each one, embracing those I knew well. By 8.00 pm fourteen people were present: the Spencers; the Lovells; another regularly attending couple, Birgit and Bob; Pete, Christine, Mark, Howard

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and Phyllis, who were also regular attenders; and three others, Catherine (or Cat, Pete’s partner who did not usually attend), a woman I had not seen there before and a man, Doug, who attended irregularly. The later arrivals did not greet everybody, but just those they knew well. However, Julie and Andrew played the role of hosts, introducing people as opportunity arose. Until about 8.15 pm, people mingled and chatted. No drink or food was served and people mostly stood in the dining area of the Spencers’s living room, rather than sitting on easy chairs. Although many people knew each other, we all appeared rather self-conscious, standing awkwardly around an increasingly crowded space and engaging mostly in small talk. Even people who knew each other well had mostly not met since the last meeting, so this period of the evening was spent renewing acquaintances through commonplace enquiries. There was little or no talk about the meditation itself or about other religious activities. I usually spent this period finding out about the everyday lives of participants, and on this occasion I chatted to Phyllis, Michael and Birgit. Phyllis asked about my research, but soon the conversation moved on to our interest in painting after she explained a friend had sent her a postcard of a church, which she had begun to copy. Meditating At 8.15 pm Julie rang a bell, at which signal people gradually went upstairs and took off their footwear outside the attic room. This was a large, carpeted room with an old sofa and easy chairs along three sides. In an alcove a massage table was folded away and many posters hung on the wall, showing information about the therapies practised by the Spencers, such as the positions of the chakras and postures in yoga, in addition to wall hangings with ethnic designs, and candles, crystals and incense burners on shelves. The Lovells were already seated cross-legged on the far side of the room, in the middle of which was a square metal sheet with a white candle at each of its corners, which provided the only lighting in the room, and a small vase of daffodils in the centre. Also on this square was a white ‘Healing Book’, containing the names of those needing healing (for ‘physical, mental or spiritual problems’, as Janet told me) known to participants. Quietly and slowly, people entered the room and took positions around the edge of the room, facing towards the centre, either on the seating provided or on the floor, some cross-legged, others with their legs outstretched. People always tended to sit in the same way and places: the Spencers and Christine, for example, sat in easy chairs or on the sofa, whilst Howard brought his own low wooden stool which enabled him to sit with his legs folded underneath; I sat cross-legged along one wall. A cassette recorder was playing quiet, ambient electronic music and Chris turned this off when people were settled. Janet then began to talk, as she was leading the meditation that evening. She told us that she was going to repeat what we had done last time, ‘calling’ upon an angel and ‘tying it with a star’: the Angel of Light and the star named Arkonium. ‘Stars’, she said, ‘are portals to divinity. We should think of them as rents in the universe through which divinity shines.’ She asked us to close our eyes and gave a dedication to that angel, in which Janet told us of its powers and its role in the universe ‘to spread understanding’, and then read a prologue from The Gospel of the Essenes (Szekely, 1976). The Essene influence will be considered later in this chapter, however it should be noted that none of the other participants brought along a copy of this text or The Essene Gospel of Peace (Szekely, 1977), which

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the Lovells read during other meditations. During this reading and the following visualization, Janet spoke slowly and deliberately, with long pauses between short sentences. Although easily audible, to my ears, her voice was soft and quiet. There was also a lilt to the sentences, with them ending on a high tone, as if posing a question or eliciting reactions from us. The music was switched back on as Janet led us in a visualization. The tone of her voice, as in the rest of the meditation, was authoritative: she dictated what would be experienced and felt, and addressed us as ‘you’, never ‘we’. We were told to open the gates to ‘the eternal and infinite garden’ and walk inside, where our attention was directed to its ‘beauty’: the trees, grass, radiant sunshine and ‘small, furry animals’. Under Janet’s direction, we wandered through the garden until we began to ‘feel lighter and lighter’ and floated above the Earth, leaving our ‘material body’ behind. We began to float towards the star named Arkonium, which ‘pulls you towards it’. The Angel of Light approached us, although we were not told what ‘he’ looked like, and he pulled us ‘into the star’, which Janet said would ‘give us knowledge’. At this point, the music was turned off and there was a silent meditation for about fifteen minutes. Although people could be heard breathing, the room remained very quiet. Before starting to attend this group, I had never practised meditation, but after about six months I was able to concentrate for the duration without being distracted by what was going on around me. The meditation, for me, acted as a period to reflect on my life, as if cocooned from the wider world and its anxieties and pressures. As I began to meditate more – and engage in similar activities at other groups – my ability to become more relaxed increased. The images and symbols used at the meditation, such as light, aided me in this, as they were often said to stand for the clarity I was trying to achieve. Discussing these experiences with other participants, especially in the period following the meditation, showed me that they were fairly typical – most people seemed to value the meditation and visualization for the clarity they engendered in thinking things through about their lives, especially to do with their personal relationships, health and work. This could be as much concerned with raising and facing problems and conflicts, however, than with resolving or quieting them. For some, the meditation also represented a way to engage actively with spirits, although not usually those talked about by the Lovells. I should also note here that I did not practise meditation outside of this or other groups, since I was never encouraged to. Indeed, in all the groups I studied, there was neither expectation nor encouragement that practices should be continued outside the group setting. Although many participants at these groups did practise meditation and other practices on their own, the information I obtained from them was that they rarely followed or drew upon the particular elements (such as symbols or texts) that figured in such practices in their group settings. To return to the particular evening I am describing, I now became uncomfortable after ten minutes and stretched my legs in front of myself; occasionally other people shifted their positions or coughed. Although most people had let their heads drop downwards with their eyes closed, sometimes they would look up, blink and let their eyes rest on something in the room. Some concentrated instead on the central square. Janet then began to speak softly, telling us that the Angel of Light ‘is leading you’ out of the star. We floated in space and were told to ‘feel yourself filled with light’,

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which we were then directed to ‘release over the Earth, to heal it’. We were also told to think of those ‘souls’ named in the Healing Book, to send light to them, as well as to ‘keep some for yourself’. We then floated back to our ‘material body’ and returned to ‘normal consciousness’. We left the garden by walking to the gate and through it, after which we were directed to protect ourselves and our light ‘by imagining an equisided cross in a circle of white light or a flower closing to a tight bud’ at each of our ‘seven chakras’, at the ‘crown, forehead, throat, heart, spleen – just below your ribs on the right – solar plexus and base of spine’. This ended the meditation. The music was turned back on and slowly, over five minutes, people stretched themselves, got up and left the room, putting on their shoes and congregating downstairs in the living room. This was done silently, but once downstairs much chatter and bustle began, in a more vociferous fashion than before the meditation. Eventually, everyone was present and remained for at least an hour. Socializing In contrast to the period before the meditation, people were now much more animated and small talk was replaced by more personal and involved discussions, mostly amongst small groups. Most meditators were good friends with at least two others, with the result that no one was left out of these discussions. There was an acceptance that anybody could join any of the discussions, or even intimate conversations, taking place; indeed there was considerable movement between different groups of people. In particular, the talk turned to religious and moral matters: experiences during the meditation; other events, meetings and workshops that had been attended or were imminent; knowledge that had been learned; books that had been read and television programmes that had been watched. Julie busied herself making tea, with many people opting for a fruity brew, although she indulged my preference for ‘normal tea’, whilst people moved on to the easy chairs in the living room or stood around in groups chatting noisily. I found myself in the kitchen first of all, talking to Pete, Cat and Christine; as with many of my conversations in this period of the meditation meetings, my enquiries into people’s lives led on to discussions of their religious activities. There was also considerable interest in my research, with different topics in which I was interested leading to people voicing their opinions and experiences of these. I mentioned I had been reading about shamanism, which catalyzed a discussion on this topic after Cat said she had a few books on it and Pete talked about a shaman based in Devon whose workshop he had attended. As Cat and Pete were police officers, it was then interesting to hear them talk about the link between shamanism and raves: a television programme Pete had watched explained how rave music created patterns in the brain corresponding to shamanic experiences. Cat said she did not usually attend the meditation group because she stayed at home to look after their two children. She and Pete explained how they did not make their interests in such matters known at work, because there was not much acceptance: ‘we have to choose our moments carefully’, she said, if they were going to say anything at all. Moving back to the living room, I spent some time chatting to Howard about how his training in Rogerian therapy was proceeding. He was in the first year of a two-year course and, although difficult, said it was providing him with a fascinating way to think about people’s relationships and to reflect upon the importance of

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meditation. We then joined a larger group, comprised of Janet, Chris, Birgit, Bob and Andrew, who were talking about crime. Chris was explaining about a case in his small Nottinghamshire town, in which a family broke into houses by using young children, that showed, he said, the ‘break-down of the family’. Janet agreed: people have no morals these days because their parents have abdicated responsibility. Birgit told us she had watched young girls damage flowers in gardens in her street; these girls, she said, had come from a local council estate, to which Chris replied, ‘That’s no surprise.’ But Birgit explained they did so because they were bored and had no hopes; they knew that when they grew up they would have no jobs. I asked whether she thought that excused their behaviour. Birgit seemed unsure, but Andrew said they needed a ‘good thrashing’, like he had received from his headmaster as a youth: ‘It did me good; I needed it.’ ‘There are other ways’, responded Birgit, although what these were was left unsaid. Andrew said that at the height of the depression in Wales in the 1930s, his family had not resorted to thieving. ‘But the depression hit all’, responded Birgit, whereas nowadays only some are hit by poverty and they can see what others own. ‘Yes, TV’s to blame for that’, added Chris. This conversation about morality and responsibility continued as people strongly voiced their opinions, without becoming argumentative. There was an acceptance that the discussion provided room for a variety of perspectives and to explore the connections between them. After about twenty minutes, this small group split up and I chatted with Julie and Andrew, then joined by Christine, Mark and the woman who I had not met before, about some television programmes we had watched. Recently there had been programmes addressing the preponderance in Sussex of headquarters of religious groups, and the link between Egyptian monuments and aliens. The former, according to Mark, had given a good portrayal of ‘paganism’. According to Julie, some of the people who came to the meditation were involved with ‘pagan activities’ and she and Andrew had a ‘pagan handfasting’ ceremony in the countryside after moving in together. Julie then started to talk about some audio cassettes that were held by NASA concerning aliens, which showed, she said, how extra-terrestrials had long been involved in human history. She asked if anybody would be interested in borrowing them, to which the woman I had not met before responded positively, and then also gave us leaflets for the book The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1994), which was a bestseller at the time. As we conversed, some people began to leave, so Julie and Andrew situated themselves near the door to see these out. Most people took their leave of everybody else in the house, usually with a hug and sometimes kissing on the cheek. Conversations, now mostly between just two or three people, were petering out and just before 11.00 pm, Julie and Andrew were left alone as the Lovells, Christine and myself left the house. We said how ‘nice’ it had been to see each other and looked forward to meeting up again in a fortnight. Meditation themes This description of an evening’s meditation can be complemented by drawing attention to the two recurrent themes during the meditation ritual itself. These were light (concomitantly with a focus on conflict with darkness) and relationships. Light

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was represented as powerful, positive and beneficial, but also as dynamic and in flux, being said to enter, fill and flow from us. At the end of one meditation in 1994, Chris told us to send our released white light energy to ‘trouble spots around the world’ such as Bosnia, Israel and Rwanda. We were typically asked to send it across the world for healing and to protect it by closing our chakras. White light was articulated as a general, permeating power linked to the personified powers of the angels and the Father-Mother God, so that by using this symbol, the Lovells sought to reproduce Essene theology. This theology, found in the Essene gospels and expressed through the Lovells’s readings and visualizations was, however, dualistic, with, for example, the ‘sons of darkness’ pitted against the ‘sons of light’. ‘Cut swathes of light through darkness and ignorance’, Janet instructed us in one meditation in which we had imbued light during the visualization. Light was also represented by candles in the middle of the attic, which on one occasion were replaced by an electric lamp shining on to a crystal. The visualizations continued the twin themes of light and relationships established in the readings and talks. On one occasion, we were told to transform our ‘dark sides’. During a visualization by Mark, one of only a couple of people other than the Lovells who occasionally led the meditation (the Spencers never did so), we were led to a lake before changing into swans said to be ‘light’ and ‘brothers’. Gliding on the lake, we then flew higher and higher into the sky until the whole Earth could be seen beneath. The second theme was that our human nature was seen as relational, in terms both of the different parts within ourselves and of our relationship with angels, with male and female aspects of divinity, with other humans and with the universe at large. Essene angels represented different qualities, such as the ‘Angel of Light’ and the ‘Angel of Love’, said to lead to peace and harmony if let into our lives. Over one period of three meetings, readings covered the ‘body, thought and feeling’ as the three sorts of existence experienced by humans, which Chris explained were the Essene terms for ‘body, mind and spirit’. He and Janet used these readings, Chris told me, to show how people are linked to each other and to the wider universe. The reading on thought, for instance, focused on peace with oneself, others and the wider universe. Often the readings drew attention to an ‘inner war’ which needs to be resolved by establishing contact with angels. A different aspect of our relational lives appeared in one visualization in which we entered a garden high up on a rocky outcrop where many people were harvesting vegetables and fruit. Here, we worked with our ‘brothers and sisters’ (who were not identified) to distribute the harvest. Chris used this to illustrate that as well as giving, we must also take. On one occasion, he told a story of chanting monks waiting for the appearance of Buddha from the skies, and of the relationship between the monks and the villagers, who toiled to provide them with food. Buddha and Christ were the only religious figures to feature during the meditation, with Buddha linked to peace and Christ to love. On another occasion, our bodies were connected to the ‘Earth Mother’ and our spirits with the ‘Father God’. The quality of these relationships was seen in terms of conflict and peace, depending on the harmony that prevailed in their balance. This was also represented, when Mark read a poem he had written on the modern destruction of the environment, and then turned his

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attention to the ‘Earth Mother, who is our body’, chastizing society’s neglect of her. This caused considerable discussion afterwards, involving different points of view about who was responsible for environmental damage. For some, such as Birgit, it was mainly the fault of corporations; for others, such as Andrew, we all needed to take responsibility. The twin symbolic themes of light and relationships were vague enough to allow manifold and divergent meanings, and the lack of consensus was noticeable at the group. For some, such as Julie and Christine, white light represented love; for others, such as Beth, Sally and Noel (three friends who regularly attended during part of my research at the group), it stood for healing; whilst for the Lovells it referred to the rectification of order and thus the conflict with darkness or evil that was absent in others’ interpretations but which figured strongly in the Essene theology articulated during the ritual. Whilst these various meanings could overlap, such that healing could be seen as an expression of love and order could lead to healing, participants’ different meanings were influenced by a variety of authorities and experiences that cut across those of the meditation group. Wide possibilities were also admitted for interpreting relationships, with some focusing on social and political matters, and others on family and friends, such as the time Julie spoke about being confronted during the meditation by some ‘uncomfortable’ truths concerning her mother which had ‘surprised’ her. It was unusual for meditators to focus on encounters with supernatural beings during meditation – the Lovells rarely mentioned the angels or divinities before or after the ritual, although they did so elsewhere. Mark, in line with his interest in environmentalism, would generally refer to ‘Mother Earth’, rather than just the Earth, when he was talking about environmental damage. He would explain that Mother Earth had a mind and agency of her own, which she would use to protect herself from ‘Man’, if need be. Since meanings and references to these symbolic themes were only weakly established it is important now to begin to address issues of leadership and authority at the group. The Lovells and the Spencers The only formal representation of the group existed in a list of telephone numbers of about twenty regular and occasional attenders, enabling the Lovells to contact us concerning any changes to the fortnightly meetings, such as one week when heavy snow forced cancellation. The group did not even have a formal name, being mostly referred to as ‘the meditation group’ or, sometimes by the Lovells, ‘the Essene meditation’. People became involved with the group through word-of-mouth alone, since it did not advertise through notices in local shops or in directories, unlike, for example, those groups associated with identifiable religious traditions examined in Chapter Seven. Although the nature of leadership at the group was therefore quite different from that in many other religious groups, there were two couples who exerted authority in it: the Lovells, who led the meditation itself, and the Spencers, in whose house it was held. Although, as in any formal or informal group, their authority was contested, in the meditation group it was the manner of this contestation that is

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significant. In order to contextualize their leadership and authority, it is important to consider some aspects of their life histories. This discussion draws upon informal interviews with the Lovells and the Spencers, as well as numerous discussions and chats at the meditation group and other events. According to Becker (1974 [1925], pp. 116–17), ‘The life history, more than any other technique except perhaps participant observation, can give meaning to the overworked notion of process … Social process, then, is not an imagined interplay of invisible forces or a vector made up of the interacting of multiple social factors, but an observable process of symbolically mediated interaction.’ Becker proposes the life history as a method by which to enrich and extend the scientific cravings of a sociology intent on producing ‘findings’ through ‘single study’ (ibid., pp. 118–19). In conjunction with the discussion of participant observational material, in this book I use life histories of key informants in the network to locate religious practice and belief in their wider social contexts. However, as Whitehead (1987, p. 92) explains, reported biographies also function as projections for people’s new meanings and must therefore be treated with care. They cannot be taken simply as descriptions of what took place in the past, but as representations of past events that are informed by present concerns. Autobiographical material tells us as much, if not more, about people’s lives in the present than in the past. The Lovells Spiritualism and healing The Lovells’s interest in religion only really developed, they told me, after they had married. Although Janet had been brought up in the Church of England, whilst Chris had been baptized a Methodist but educated by monks and nuns at a Roman Catholic school, neither attended church after childhood. Chris attributed this to their rejection of these churches’ lack of emphasis on ‘taking responsibility for oneself’. After marrying in their twenties, they attended a Christian Science church for 18 months, which they liked because of its teachings on self-responsibility and on everybody being ‘a spark of the Godhead’. However, disillusionment with the emphasis laid on Mary Baker Eddy’s writings, as well as the group’s aversion to the subject of death, turned them instead to involvement with a series of other traditions: a spiritualist development group, Anthroposophy and White Eagle Lodge. Their experiences in these suggested growing sensitivity to, and control over, spirits, energies and thoughts. Whilst their movement through them was consecutive, they did not talk about this as if it involved conversion from one to another. The Lovells did not speak in terms of having adopted wholesale a new tradition at the expense of completely rejecting their previous ones. Instead, they spoke about recognizing the value of certain aspects of all with which they had been involved. In the small spiritualist development group, led by a medium with experience in spiritualist churches and healing groups, the Lovells learned to become receptive to the spirits of deceased humans and the energies these exercised in order to heal through humans. These abilities developed in their brief involvement with Anthroposophy and longer involvement with White Eagle Lodge. Emerging from the Theosophical Society, which itself developed as an erudite and elitist reaction to

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popular spiritualism, Anthroposophy teaches the attainment of knowledge through meditation and study of the writings of its founder, Rudolf Steiner. The Lovells considered that the Society had not ‘stretched’ them sufficiently, being too tied to Steiner’s words and to what Chris called ‘left-brain thinking’, although their children (in their early twenties at the time of research) had attended a Steiner school. It was through White Eagle Lodge that the Lovells’s involvement in healing more fully developed. Emerging from spiritualist and Theosophist currents, the Lodge was established in Britain in 1936 by Grace Cooke, who channelled a spirit teacher and healer known as White Eagle, a deceased a Native American.1 Cooke had been a spiritualist medium since 1913 but turned from giving evidence for people’s survival after death to philosophical teaching, under the guidance of White Eagle, who is seen as a messenger from the Great White Brotherhood, a clique of exalted religious masters referred to by Theosophists. After her death in 1979, Cooke’s husband, Ivan, took on the task of communicating White Eagle’s teachings and on his death in 1981 this passed to her two daughters. According to The White Eagle Lodge: Purpose and Work, an introductory booklet published by the group which the Lovells lent me, ‘The purpose of the Lodge teaching is to help men develop this inner light [of the Christ spirit] (which is their true nature) so that it radiates throughout their whole being, and out into the world to bless, to heal and to comfort others.’ The Lovells attended the weekly healing sessions and the fortnightly meditations run by their local group, eventually becoming registered healers with the Lodge. Healing is central to the work of the Lodge and is understood to work in a variety of ways, on body, mind, spirit and social levels. It is practised by both the laying-on of hands and by sending out healing energies, and members are asked to spend five minutes a day on a healing prayer for all those who require it. At the time of research, the Lovells were still registered healers with the Lodge and continued these practices, but no longer attended the groups, which they felt were too hierarchical. They spoke very warmly about the Lodge, however, and a number of its theological features were influential on their thinking, including the dual nature of God as father and mother, and the historical importance of the Essenes for preparing the world for Jesus, who had acted as a channel for ‘the Christ’ (see White Eagle, 1985). Of equal influence seems to be the ethos of the group, which Nelson (1969, p. 202) describes in the following way: ‘White Eagle apparently believes in the importance of a family atmosphere and in the importance of harmonious conditions.’ Essene living The Lovells told me that their initial contact with Essene teachings came unexpectedly by the book The Teachings of the Essenes from Enoch to the Dead Sea Scrolls (Szekely, 1978) ‘literally’ jumping off the shelf at Janet in their local public library. Janet had never heard of it before, but it moved her to tears and she insisted on reading it to Chris. From a reference in this book, she discovered Szekely’s editions of Essene texts, published from the 1920s, which Chris believed to have been translated from Szekely’s photographic memory of the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts in the Vatican library. According to a leaflet for the Essene group (different from the meditation group) they subsequently established, Szekely ‘taught their [the Essenes’] teachings to many visitors who came to a ranch in Tecate,

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Baja, California called “Rancho La Puerta” during the 1940s. It was a health and study centre drawing on topics such as education, meditation and ancient spiritual philosophies.’ The Lovells said that the main attraction of the Essenes for them was the idea of an ancient culture that retreated from wider society to set up a selfsufficient community, where individuals took responsibility for themselves in the context of acting for common purposes with others.2 These Essene teachings connected with the Lovells’s increasing interest in healing therapies, which they had begun to practise after their time at the spiritualist group. In the early 1990s they pursued these full-time, practising astrology, hypnotherapy and psychotherapy (Janet) and Bach flower essences (Chris). Janet was a housewife, but she had more free time now that their children had left home, whilst Chris had been a manager for a pharmaceutical company and took early retirement. At the time of research, they were in their early fifties, living in a comfortable three-bedroom terraced house in a town near Nottingham. The emphasis of Essene teachings on ‘cosmic energies’ fitted well with their understanding of illness and healing, as being caused by the effect of various fluctuating energies on people’s ‘thoughtforms’ and therefore their bodies. The aim of their therapies, they said, was to help people to ‘flow’ with these energies, by using the patients’ own abilities to clear out ‘passages’ in which energy was ‘blocked’, to mitigate the effects of ‘negative’ or ‘destructive’ energies and to maximize the effects of ‘positive’ energies. They saw this as enabling people to overcome their fears, which arose from not knowing what was happening to them, and thus to be their own healers, although they said they only gave their ‘patients’ information on ‘spiritual matters’ if they expressed an interest. For example, Janet said that in her psychotherapy counselling, she would ask the patient to ‘describe what their negative energies feel like’ and then to say how they would like to get rid of them. They also referred patients to the Spencers, whose practice of biorhythms achieved the ‘same result’. The effect of ‘negative energy’ was also described in terms of groups: in the early years of the meditation group, they said, a particularly ‘negative person’ used to attend, leaving Janet herself feeling negative. Janet said they established the Essene group in 1985 ‘to fulfil the vision that one day the Essene Wisdom could be grounded and brought to light in England’. This was done through making contact, but not affiliating, with the International Biogenic Society, which Szekely founded in 1928 to apply Essene teachings to the twentieth century in terms of living in harmony with the environment, with an emphasis on work, nutrition, medicine and fulfilment (Szekely, 1978, p. 5). They also made contact with George Trevelyan, who promoted Szekely’s writings and Essene living, as well as holding an interest in Anthroposophy and White Eagle Lodge (Trevelyan, 1977, p. 138; 1978, p. 9; 1986, p. 81), to ask him to act in an honorary capacity in the group and to speak at some of its retreats. For some in the Nottinghamshire network, Trevelyan was a prominent figure as a result of his writings and his involvement with the Wrekin Trust (an adult educational establishment emphasizing a holistic approach to learning) and the Findhorn community in Scotland (Sutcliffe, 2003b, pp. 80–83, 115; Trevelyan, 1986, pp. 8–10). Bloom (1991, p. 2) regards him ‘as the father-figure of the New Age movement in Britain’, words echoed by Janet in one of my conversations with her.

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This was mainly a correspondence group since the members, of whom there were less than one hundred at the time of research, lived across the country. Practice was therefore primarily individual, or held amongst couples or very small numbers of intimate local friends, with people expected to perform rituals at similar times each day. These were morning and evening communions, which, according to Chris, had three objectives: to make people aware of the energies of nature and the cosmos, to make them aware of their own bodily energies, and to form a link between these two (see Szekely, 1978, pp. 29–52). The only organized meetings for all members were yearly countryside retreats, although two or three local groups also met up to practise Essene living. The Lovells considered the meditation group to be one of these, although none of its other attenders were members of their Essene group and the Essene content held little meaning for participants. The Lovells established the meditation group five years before my research began, with the aim of enacting an Essene lifestyle. Before the numbers grew too large, this was held weekly in their own home and included a period of self-reflection on the week by each member in front of the group, something the Lovells likened to the Essene ‘weekly inventory’ which involved ‘self-reflection’ in a group context where the ‘elders’ would give ‘help and guidance’. After two or three years, however, numbers grew and a majority within the group made the decision to drop this practice, about which the Lovells were ‘not happy’. The Spencers had started attending around this time and were amongst those people who wanted the group to develop in a different direction, away from the exercise of guidance by more longstanding members of the group who were more focused on Essene teachings. Although the Lovells voiced their displeasure about this and were supported by a number of others, they had to be content with bringing in Essene teachings solely through the meditation itself. They told me that they wanted the group to act more as a ‘teaching group’, but some members were only interested in their ‘own interpretations’ of Essene readings. The Lovells, however, continued the weekly inventory on their own, and their Essene retreats functioned as times of ‘guidance’ in a ‘sharing and caring group atmosphere’ as practised by the Essenes. The Spencers Healing and divination The Spencers’s house had numerous religious pictures and sayings on their walls, such as those by Eileen Caddy (a founder of the Findhorn community), the channeller Sheila Patterson and the Christian poem ‘Footprints’. These various, even divergent, worldviews indicated the plethora of authorities influential upon them. Julie and Andrew met when each was in their first marriage and becoming involved with religious practices outside of mainstream churches. Julie had been brought up Anglican, but stopped going when she married. She said she had always been ‘afraid of change’, coming from a ‘stable middle-class upbringing’. Later, whilst raising her children, Julie ‘casually’ attended a spiritualist development circle with her first husband, but it was only by taking yoga classes for fitness and being introduced to meditation that her interest in religious matters grew. She met Andrew at a healing fair: he was leading a workshop on biorhythms, a method of monitoring a person’s state of health by using birthdates to plot periodic

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cycles of physical, mental and emotional states, enabling people to live in tune with these. Julie had heard of this, but thought it ‘sounded crazy’. It turned out that they shared the same birth date and Andrew asked to keep in touch with her, telephoning every six weeks to check on her biorhythms. He also introduced her to a professional medium who led Julie in a workshop on healing and dowsing. This medium told her that she had healing powers, which Julie did not at first believe even though she experienced a ‘sense of coming home’ at the workshop. This led her, she said, to realize what had previously been missing in her life. Consequently, she began attending many healing workshops. Andrew, too, had become interested in healing when introduced to yoga by a friend who resolved a nasal problem of his by ‘natural methods’. At that time he was an active member of the Church of England, having been brought up to attend Welsh chapel. But this experience, coupled with criticism of what he called the ‘materialistic bent’ of those churchgoers and the disappointment he felt when his vicar failed to share his enthusiasm about Hindu texts, led him to leave the church, although his first wife continued to attend. Subsequently, he became more engrossed in healing and met the medium already mentioned. Regular contact between him and Julie eventually led, she said, to ‘strong urges’ to leave their partners. Resistance to this was ‘useless’ and became ‘very, very traumatic’, so they tried living together for a week and got on terribly. Despite this, they soon bought a house together, moving in with Julie’s 13-year-old daughter, but continued having doubts. Two things stopped them splitting up, according to Julie: their ‘knowledge’ that what they were doing was ‘right’, and continual consultations with Tarot cards and runestones that always told her to stay with Andrew. This personal disruption, which continued with Julie’s daughter becoming ‘very, very rebellious’, was accompanied by frequent religious disruptions, with the Spencers relating their religious history in terms of many ‘jolts’ from the different people, experiences and ideas they encountered. This representation of change was reinforced by Andrew describing himself as a ‘catalyst’. Since that time six years previous to my research, the Spencers had become involved with more religious activities, including the practice of various forms of healing and divination. They had also set up of a ‘cancer care group’ in which they used these practices to help the terminally ill come to terms with their condition, both physically and mentally, and to show them that ‘death is not the end’. They habitually practised astrology and pendulum dowsing to make better sense of their own lives and the lives of their clients. On several occasions, Andrew dowsed in front of me, by asking a pendulum questions to which it could answer positively or negatively, depending on the direction of its swing. He explained that his ‘unconscious mind’ operated the pendulum, which acted as a ‘mediator’ between that and his ‘conscious mind’. Since the unconscious is in tune with the pattern of the universe, he said, the conscious mind can discover things it could never possibly know. They used these practices to address mundane, everyday enquiries, such as where to find lost keys, but also more serious matters, such as which particular therapy should be used for a patient. These various practices were underpinned by the Spencers’s broader perspective on life. They claimed that ‘taking notice of feelings’ had changed their lives. Andrew described themselves not as ‘psychic’, but as ‘sensitive’ to the world around them.

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This world, he explained, goes beyond what is experienced materially to include a ‘spiritual dimension’ that manifests in feelings surrounding places and objects, and in meaningful coincidences. Julie claimed to be able intuitively to ‘feel the spiritual dimension’ of places, such as the ‘sadness’ of a Scottish village where a massacre had taken place and a feeling of ‘dislike’ towards the new cathedral in Coventry. They said they had also developed their abilities to recognize meaningful coincidences, confirming their belief in an underlying pattern to the universe. ‘These coincidences used to amaze me,’ Julie said, ‘but nowadays my eye just twinkles as I think to myself, “that’s cleverly arranged”.’ Andrew pointed out that it was especially in meeting people that these coincidences figured. Groups and teachers The Spencers’s broad perspective underlay their engagement not only with specific practices at an individual or practitioner–client level, but also with religious groups. On first living together they became part of a Fountain Light group to alter the bad feeling that they said surrounded their Nottinghamshire town. Originally started, they told me, on the English south coast to counter disturbances by youths in Brighton in the 1950s, Fountain Light groups use meditation to transmit healing light, similar to the Essene meditation. The Spencers admitted they were ‘shocked’ by how ‘rough’ was the town to which they had moved – they both described themselves as having ‘middle-class’ upbringings and lives, with Julie working as a housewife and Andrew as a time-and-motion business consultant. But the group had, they said, achieved its results and no longer met. They also began attending various retreats to learn more about their divinatory and healing practices, where they met people who, they said, ‘thought deeply’ about ‘spiritual matters’. One such man with whom they became friends was a ‘spiritual teacher’ who ran an institute in Wales and whose thoughts were recorded in a typed manuscript, Towards the Whole Being: Excerpts – Essays – Aphorisms, which they lent out to anyone interested, including several of the meditators. This manuscript teaches that a sexual polarity lies behind all existence, manifested most obviously (to humans) in male and female sexes, but more subtly in terms of all humans having both male and female aspects, as do all elements in the universe. According to the Spencers, the ‘whole being’ refers to our attainment of ‘reconciling’ these aspects and then being able to live more ‘fulfilled’ lives. Not long before my fieldwork commenced, the Spencers had become actively interested in ufology and channelling, which they linked in a number of ways, including their belief that the Ascended Masters are aliens. They were attending a local ufology group and had become interested in the writings of David Icke that discussed aliens on Earth. They often expressed this interest at the meditation group, for example by talking about science-fiction television programmes and films. On one occasion, Andrew explained that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, had incorporated into that television series things he had heard during channelled discourses by ‘The Nine’, a group of highly evolved beings whose book of discourses (Schlemmer and Jenkins, 1993) he lent and sold to people at the group. The Spencers also had a close local friend who had begun to channel over the past couple of years and whose typed manuscript of channelled discourses they also lent people. This interest in channelling led them to start organizing day-long ‘workshops’ in which they invited channellers to talk about their experiences, help people develop

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their own abilities to channel, and sometimes actually to channel. Terminology from these channellers, such as reference to ‘a plan’ and the idea that ‘all life is a learning’, figured in their conversation during my research. This growing interest was combined with the Spencers’s active involvement in the meditation group, but when they spoke about the Lovells, it was in the context of their shared interests in healing, rather than the meditation group, and they never spoke about the Essenes. Despite this involvement with a number of groups, Andrew claimed that he did not need a ‘sense of community’ since he has a ‘direct relationship with God’. Comparisons The life histories of the Lovells and the Spencers contain many similarities that aid an understanding of authority at the meditation group. Both couples came from mainstream Christian backgrounds, had married young to raise a family, and sooner or later ceased churchgoing. They saw themselves as middle-class, the men working in management positions in the private sector and the women as housewives, living in comfortable houses in towns that were, however, badly affected by the collapse of the British coalmining industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Religious involvement outside Christian churches came through spiritualism and healing therapies, and continued through contact with other healers, mediums and channellers. In conversation, Chris and Andrew frequently referred to their employment as managers to illustrate and explain points about how relationships, particularly leadership, worked. Notwithstanding the sense of identity their work gave them (for Chris, even after retirement to become a self-employed healer), as also the selfprofessed ‘middle-class’ status of each couple, the importance of their work was represented in terms of being able to relate to those below and above them by working as part of a team. Chris explained how he had set rules for his ‘team meetings’ so that nobody’s opinion was criticized without three positive things first being said about it. Similarly, Andrew saw his work as a time-and-motion manager in normative terms as enabling people to do their work ‘better’. These upbeat assessments of their jobs were, however, complemented by an explicit recognition of inhibitions of their innovations by leaders and hierarchies in their workplaces. Chris said that it was a ‘blessed relief’ to have left his job, not because he did not enjoy working in his team, but because the team’s ability was ‘smothered’ by some in positions above him. ‘Yes, and those who didn’t even work hard to get there’, added Janet when we discussed this in interview. Andrew likewise saw his work as hampered by ‘bosses’ who were too ‘pig-headed’ to let go of their ideas about how things should be done. As I will show further on, discussions about leadership arose frequently in the meditation group, demonstrating ambiguous attitudes towards authority. Furthermore, this ambiguity featured in both couples’ involvement with religious groups and teachings which had reasonably clear and strong authority structures. Even though they moved on from many of these, which they couched in terms of a rejection of leadership and hierarchy in favour of self-responsibility, this should not blind analysis to the fact that they continued to engage with authorities, as with the Lovells’s Essene group and the Spencers’s interest in channellers. Indeed, Footprints is specifically a poetic description of reliance upon another: ‘“Why, when I needed

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you most have you not been there for me?” The Lord replied, “The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand, is when I carried you.”’ Thus, instead of a progression towards the overturning of external authorities by self-authority, the Lovells’s and Spencers’s own presentations of their life histories show instead a complication in the influence of religious authorities upon their lives, as they became involved with more of these without completely rejecting the practices or beliefs they had been taught. Disengagement with traditions and groups did not lead to the loss of this inculturation or even to a commitment to hold firm against external authorities in the future. Indeed, such authorities were actively sought by seeking legitimacy (such as the Lovells’s contact with Trevelyan or the Spencers’s courting of channellers) and by seeking access to new knowledge and techniques (as in learning healing or divinatory techniques). The picture that emerges from their lives is gradual involvement with a plethora of authorities carried into subsequent involvements. In this manner, these authorities limited each other’s ability formatively to inculcate a specific sense of self and associated dispositions or habitus. Their relativizing effect leads, that is, to a situation of nonformativeness within the religious field, a situation I will now explore in more detail regarding the meditation group. Authorities and experiences The ritualization of meditation My discussion of the Lovells and the Spencers has examined the background to their leadership at the meditation group, but this must now be explored as it took place in practice, in other words the manner in which authority was exercised at the group. The meditation itself was clearly the focal point of the group’s meetings, but it was not necessarily the most important part of the evening for participants. Instead, it must be contextualized within the evening as a whole, which requires it be examined in terms of how it was ritualized. As discussed in the last chapter, Bell’s exploration of ritualization, drawing upon Bourdieu, highlights the formation of a sense of ritual. At the meditation group, the participants’ sense of the meditation as ritual was shown by its demarcation in space (in the attic) and time (by the bell). This marked out the exercise of leadership by the Lovells (or whoever they had arranged to lead the ritual in place of them), including their transmitting of knowledge from the Essene gospels and way of life. This leadership conveyed group participation through the reception of such knowledge, the practice of meditation, and the performance of common actions. This last included the regular action of sending white light across the world and the focus on those named in the Healing Book, as well as other actions such as when we stood in a circle holding hands whilst Chris led us in a prayer by White Eagle, to mark the cessation of meetings during one summer. Despite this formal exercise of leadership, the authority of the Lovells was weak, being unable strongly to shape participants’ ritual experiences, worldviews or broader practices, as already discussed preliminarily in my discussion of symbolic themes. This weakness was apparent not only from my observations during participation, but also from discussions with meditators. A marked aspect of the ritualization was the

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way in which many (including regular) participants did not concern themselves with parts of the ritual that the Lovells saw as important. Apart from the Lovells, only a couple of other meditators had any familiarity with the Essene gospels, whilst the majority had never even looked at these or read about the Essenes except in passing. Furthermore, irregular or new participants were not attracted to the group because of this Essene content, but came because they had heard that the ritual was ‘nice’ or ‘calming’ and because it was an opportunity to meet ‘like-minded people’, that is, people who were also interested in healing therapies, channelling or ‘the spiritual side of life’. This lack of interest in the formal nature of the ritual was further demonstrated by the fact that few meditators inserted or knew the names in the Healing Book, and Janet was the only person apart from Chris who knew the prayer to White Eagle. Meditation postures and behaviour also varied considerably within the group, with most people simply sitting on comfy sofas and chairs, and few following the Lovells’s lead in sitting cross-legged on the floor, with straightened back, eyes closed and regular breathing. Occasionally, idiosyncratic actions interrupted the ritual, such as the time Christine left the meditation to go downstairs early because, she told me, a crystal on a shelf behind her head was giving her a headache. The Lovells did not attempt to instil bodily discipline during the meditation, the socializing period or at other times. Indeed, as my fieldwork progressed it transpired that only a handful of participants claimed to meditate on a regular, weekly basis in private, with only Howard doing so daily, and of these none did so with reference to Essene beliefs. Rather, their meditative practice involved a range of other authorities with which they had become involved. This situation is very different from the involvement of participants in practices that might be thought to be similar, such as Zen meditation in the United States as discussed by Preston (1988). Here, ‘members come to share common experiences and meanings’ and ‘particular practices figure into this process of personal transformation and membership acquisition’ (ibid., p. 7). Preston found that posture and seating arrangement, in regular lengthy sessions, was ritually prescribed and authoritatively enforced, and combined with techniques to train the mind through meditation on conundrums (koans) set by teachers. Students’ thoughts on these, and their understanding of symbols and beliefs, were assessed and guided by teachers in separate regular meetings. Although many of those involved had experience, previously and contemporaneously, with other religious practices and traditions, Preston makes it clear that authorities in his meditation group formatively shaped his and fellow meditators’ experiences, provided them with a particular sense of self through disciplinary techniques. The contrast with the meditation group in the Nottinghamshire network could not be starker. Meditators frequently spoke about the ‘power’ of the energies or ‘presence’ of spirits they had experienced during the meditation, and how this experience had affected them, but the nature of these varied considerably. They were, furthermore, explicitly related to other practices, so that the Essene content supplied by the Lovells was supplanted or ignored. During one post-meditation discussion, Julie explained that she and Andrew had each felt their ‘self’ shift on to a ‘higher plane of consciousness’ and begun to feel ‘a bit out of control’ whilst meditating. This

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was something they had experienced at other times over the past month, as they had become increasingly ‘absent-minded’ in recent weeks, which she explained in terms of the energies the Ascended Masters were sending to the Earth, resulting in people reaching ‘higher vibrations’. Those meditators who practised healing therapies quite often spoke about acting as a ‘channel’, during the meditation, for the particular energy to which they felt attuned when healing. As discussed in the next chapter, Christine’s experiences of floating near a star in meditation became interpreted by her in terms of connections with the Ascended Masters, despite the Lovells’s overtly cautious and wary attitude to channellers, most of whom, they said, were merely channelling their ‘higher selves’. Through these connections and transformations experienced during meditation, participants often spoke about gaining a greater understanding of the energies or spirits with which they were already working in other practices. I was repeatedly told that it was the silent meditation period in the middle of the visualization that participants most valued, described as ‘relaxing’ (Christine), ‘nice’ (Phyllis) or ‘powerful’ (Howard and Noel). Indeed, some (such as Noel, Sally and Beth, as will be explored in Chapter Six) were openly critical of the Essene content, explaining that they came for the opportunity to silently meditate in the presence of others, since this ‘generated energy’. I am not suggesting that in other ritual situations a single common experience is inculcated amongst participants, but that rather than establishing (through discipline and authority) a practical discursive framework that could tend formatively to shape people’s experiences (including by the assimilation of other experiences so that they become understood through reference to that framework), the meditation ritual provided merely a common context for individuals, on the basis of their other practices, to work individually with its elements in conjunction with many others. It would be wrong, though, to interpret this transformation as merely personal, because meditators acknowledged the common experience, however personally varied, effected by the meditation ritual. Methodologically, it is crucial to pay attention to this interpersonal dimension, yet as shown in previous chapters this is rarely achieved in New Age studies, which tend to isolate the individual’s experiences. In the meditation group, there was a sense of commonality that not only enabled ritualization but also facilitated the sense that the ritual had transformed participants, albeit in different ways. This sense of transformation helps explain the nature of the subsequent socializing period and thus why the group had continued to exist for several years, why around a dozen people continued to attend, and why it was successful in continuing to attract new attenders. Commonality and socializing A sense of commonality was conveyed by a number of frequent descriptions of the group. At one meeting, Andrew described the participants as a ‘motley bunch, but hangs together’. Although there was recognition that people had different experiences during the visualization and silent meditation, there was still a tendency afterwards for participants to speak of ‘we’ and ‘us’, as in ‘The quiet part should be longer, it’s strong for us’ (Christine), ‘I feel there’s more that we can do, as a group’ (Mark, referring to the energy released for healing), and ‘It’s a good group, this one; I like

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what we get into’ (occasional female participant). Likewise, the commitment to a joint exploration of ideas and issues in the discussions afterwards, despite different social and political viewpoints and backgrounds, shows the formation of a feeling of commonality. The meditation ritual was essential in providing this sense of commonality and shows how those periods it followed and preceded can be related. The difference between the relatively tentative and formal interaction before the meditation was replaced by an engaged and personal interaction afterwards, in which confidences were shared, opinions vigorously expressed, invitations extended and information distributed. It would be too simplistic to view this period as resulting from people becoming more relaxed with each other as the evening progressed. Rather, an understanding of the very intense discussions and the very personal sharing requires further explanation, such as the re-establishment of commonality through ritualization and transformative experience that I have already discussed. This period was enabled, however, not solely on the basis of the meditative experience, but also by the fact that nearly everyone present was engaged in at least one other religious group in the local area and at least two other religious practices (which may or may not have related to the groups they attended at the time). The meditation ritual, then, was crucial in establishing a context in which these diverse experiences, practices and knowledges could be brought out in a collective but personal manner, without establishing a framework that shaped people’s discussions of them. This socializing period was quite different from that before the meditation, with its focus on religious matters through discussions, the sharing of personal feelings and experiences, invitations to groups and events, and the exchange and lending of books and other goods. The Spencers especially took a prominent role in dissemination, often handing out leaflets on forthcoming events, such as channelling workshops, fairs and on one occasion a national Rainbow Warrior gathering in London, as well as lending books, such as The Only Planet of Choice (Schlemmer and Jenkins, 1993) and The Celestine Prophecy (Redfield, 1994). They would also buy batches of ten books that they had found useful, at a reduced price from publishers, to sell to the others – a welcome source of cut-price primary literature for a graduate researcher without full photocopying rights in his university department. This socializing period, then, depended on the shared yet differentiated ritualized period of meditation. Through such a religious experience, the meditators were able to relate to each other in more personal ways: by acknowledgement of their experiences of transformation in meditation, they were able to express other feelings and thoughts about a variety of topics, leading to discussion and debate. The crucial point to note is that during this period the meditators were neither just friends enjoying each other’s company and establishing personal bonds, nor religious adherents fresh from the ritualistic re-affirmation of their faith. Rather, they were pursuing their religious interests on the basis of a sense of commonality through ritualization and transformation. This was marked by the establishment of intimacy, whereby there was a considerable degree of openness about personal issues amongst even those meditators who did not know each other very well. This featured also in the group discussions, during which personal, social, religious and moral issues overlapped. In

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particular, these discussions typified the way in which religious themes were used to thread links between popular culture, work, health and personal lives. Before turning to these discussions, it must be stressed that this commonality should not be interpreted in terms of a shared discourse, in contrast to New Age studies that lead us to expect the existence of dominant discourses about the self or new age at such groups. Notions of self-responsibility, for example, held no clear meaning in terms of self-authority but rather referred to responsibilities of statuses and roles. The way in which people referred to self-responsibility was more in terms of not becoming entrapped by authoritative traditions (religious or other), rather than asserting an inward authority against social authorities. Similarly, although participants made occasional references to the ‘new age’, this did not constitute a key taxon as described by Sutcliffe, but was an occasional phrase used strategically in specific ways and with quite divergent meanings. Janet’s legitimation of the Essene group through reference to George Trevelyan as the ‘father of the new age’, for example, existed alongside the Lovells’s explicit criticism of the term ‘new age’, which they felt had become hackneyed through its link to channellers, since this suggested that people needed to do nothing to achieve change. Because the group existed within a wider network, there was a sense amongst most meditators that there were like-minded people and groups, but ‘new age’ or ‘new age movement’ were rarely used to describe these. Discussions in the socializing period at the group recurrently addressed the nature of leadership. Leadership and the role of individuals in groups were ideas played with discursively, not to reject the former in favour of individualism, but to explore the nature and limits of each. In this way, leadership and individual participation, in the meditation group but also in people’s other practices, was presented as ambiguous, although not necessarily contradictory, as already seen in my discussion of the Lovells and the Spencers. Similar ambiguity was held towards Christianity, with many meditators expressing a liking and nostalgia for ‘warm’ services and ‘nice’ ministers, whilst admitting that they ceased churchgoing as a result of many Christians’ narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Birgit’s upbringing in a Lutheran church in Germany had, she said, scared her with its ‘hell talk’: ‘Even now I can’t go to church without feeling it to be cold.’ In particular, she did not like being ‘spoken down to’ by a priest; there is no need, she said, for a mediator between oneself and God, as she knew from her experiences of nature: ‘these give me my strength’. Janet agreed, but thought that whilst cathedrals were ‘cold’, small country churches were ‘warmer’. Indeed, many meditators admitted they liked to enter churches when services were not on, to ‘sit quietly and feel the presence of God’ (Phyllis), to ‘pray’ (Phyllis and Howard), or to ‘meditate’ (Janet and Christine). This ambiguity seemed well captured by the meditation ritual itself, in which the exercise of a leadership was extended with weak authority, but remained important for providing the context for practice and basis for group commonality that participants found highly valuable. This commonality was further heightened by the shared class position of most meditators. I have already discussed the ambiguous positions of Chris and Andrew, who, as middle managers, not only derived a significant sense of self-worth from what they described as their middle-class status, but also frequently discussed the way in which they were held back in their work by those above them, demonstrating that

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ambiguity towards leadership also reflected in attitudes towards wider society and organized religious groups. In fact, the majority of meditators held professional work status: Birgit as an NHS administrator, her husband Bob as a university administrator, Pete and Cat as police officers, Christine as a secretary, and Howard as a public librarian. The majority (like others in the network in general) had post-compulsory educational qualifications, whilst some (like Chris, Birgit, Bob and Howard) held degrees. Yet, each of these articulated dissatisfaction with their employment in terms of the stultifying effects of hierarchies and superiors. As the cases of Chris and Andrew show, this cannot simply be reduced to the bureaucratic structure of public services. Nor should it be reduced to a British attitude of malcontentedness towards work, for not only did people talk proudly and engagingly about their roles but their ambiguity centred on one particular issue, namely the hindrance to these roles resulting from not being given enough authority to carry out their ideas and designs. This therefore represents a shared class experience that is important for understanding the nature of authority in the meditation group and in the religious lives of its participants, which will be further explored in Chapter Eight. Interestingly, however, there was little gossip during the group’s meetings or amongst those participants who socialized together at other times. Largely neglected in sociological studies, not least by sociologists of religion, gossip is examined by Hannerz (1967, p. 37) in terms of the trading of ‘scarce information’ about absent third parties, so maintaining values and standards within a close-knit network and policing its boundaries. Gossip may take many forms, from serious whispers between two intimates to raucous jokes within a group, but the meditation group was notable for the lack of such behaviour and resulting rivalry. Even when I informally socialized with attenders or participated with them in other religious settings, such gossip was rare. This was in stark contrast to those groups associated with particular religious traditions I discuss in Chapter Seven, whose leaders even gossiped about people I had never met. Hannerz’s understanding of gossip suggests it should be considered in terms of social capital, which acts as one form of the capital extant in any specific field. From this perspective, it is entirely consistent that gossip should be relatively absent from a context such as the meditation group, since religious capital was equally absent. As my discussion of the group indicates, the existence of a multiplicity of relativized authorities excluded competition over religious capital. Although a cursory understanding of the group, based solely upon official discourses, might suggest the presence of an Essene-based disciplinary practice, habitus and sense of self, couched in terms of self-authority and thus existing as part of the New Age, the contextualized study I have presented shows a different situation. This lack of religious capital for which participants could compete meant that the group existed, but did not participate, within a wider religious field of legitimacy and scarcity. The nonformative nature of its authorities situated it within a nonformative region of the religious field. The lack of capital pertaining to the group – which is not to deny the existence and articulation of diverse capitals and thus habituses relating to participants’ class positions and involvement in other fields – meant that gossip pertaining to the group ceased to have meaning. Thus, although there was a certain sense of commonality regarding the group and its wider network, the social

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boundaries involved in this were equally weak – one consequence of which was my extremely easy access to the group. As I will explore in the next two chapters, this situation regarding religious capital and gossip was found equally in other groups and events in the network. By focusing on one group in the Nottinghamshire network, this chapter has explored the way in which multiple authorities cut across the group’s boundaries. Although there was the presence of leadership based in a particular religious tradition centred upon a representation of the theology and practice of the Essenes, the presence of other authorities in participants’ practices and discourses meant that this tradition held little authority in shaping participants’ experiences or senses of self. This did not mean, however, that such experiences were purely personal or idiosyncratic, for there was a relatively strong sense of commonality within the group, in which experiences of transformation during the meditation ritual facilitated a heightened engagement in religious networking afterwards. This group can therefore only properly be understood by contextualizing it through an examination of other practices, beliefs and authorities in the network, including in the life histories of other participants. This is pursued in the following chapters. Notes 1 This discussion draws from the Lovells and from Nelson (1969, pp. 201–3). 2 Whilst Kranenborg (1998) traces interest in the Essenes in Euro-American esoteric circles from the nineteenth century, especially amongst Theosophists, the Lovells’s sole point of reference was Szekely.

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Chapter Five

Channelling workshops This chapter broadens and deepens the last chapter’s ethnography of the meditation group by focusing upon the practice of channelling, in which people transmit messages from beings said to exist beyond the physical plane. Gaining popularity in the United States in the 1980s, the term ‘channelling’ referred to phenomena with a wide variety of religious genealogies, practices and sources. Although scholars have attempted to define the content or lingua franca of these messages, inevitably seen as identical to New Age beliefs as a whole (see Hammer, 2001; Riordan, 1992), this is undermined by the same methodological difficulties that beset the encapsulation of social phenomena as ‘New Age’: the neglect of interpretive meaning (either for channellers or their audiences), the focus on published and prominent texts, and the general vagueness and multiplicity of themes and tropes. I therefore use the term ‘channelling’ to refer not to a social or ideological movement, but merely a common practice, namely a form of spirit possession in which the spirit is held to be a religious master of some sort (rather than an ordinary deceased human, as in spiritualism, or a deity, as in paganism or Pentecostalism), whose primary purpose is to deliver messages of general interest to humans regarding the current state of, and future changes to, the world and our place within it.1 The prevalence of channelling has been noted by several scholars, with Hanegraaff (1996) listing it as one of the five major trends in the New Age and Melton (1992, p. 21) claiming that ‘if the sheer volume of New Age literature is any indication, channeling is possibly the single most important and definitive aspect of the New Age. It is certainly the activity which has had the greatest success in mobilizing support for the movement as a whole.’ It is therefore curious that channelling has received very little empirical study, especially since the practice so explicitly involves the body in that channellers are believed to be temporarily taken over by another being. In this chapter, I focus upon two channelling workshops organized by the Spencers and attended by several of the meditators. In tracing their responses to the practices and beliefs taught by the channellers in a far more authoritative manner than those at the meditation group, I explore the power relations involving the channellers by interpreting their discourses in terms of practical relationships with their spirits and audience, and the public and private audience reactions to them. In particular, I highlight the temporary, ludic nature of the channellers’ authority, and how this relates to their social roles and organization. The effect of one of the workshops upon Christine, a regular participant of the meditation group who subsequently began to channel, is examined in terms of the various religious authorities within her life. This shows that the nature of authority that existed in the meditation group extended beyond it, into the other activities and groups of the Nottinghamshire network. Such

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an interpretation is consolidated in the next chapter, which focuses upon another group in the network, the religious fair. Two channelling workshops Shah’s workshop The Ascended Masters’ messages In spring 1994, I attended an event in which Shah, a channeller from the United States, held a one-day workshop in Nottinghamshire to deliver messages and discuss channelling.2 Julie and Andrew Spencer had invited Shah after being put into contact with her through one of their friends who had seen her speak the previous year. The Spencers publicized the event by word-ofmouth and by putting up notices in local cafes and bookshops, and booked the hall of the leisure centre in which the event took place between 10.00 am and 4.00 pm. I travelled there in Mark’s car, with Christine and another of his female friends I had not met before, who were looking forward to hearing what Shah had to say. About fifty people attended, including half a dozen from the meditation group, and the Spencers appeared to know at least half of these. They later told me that the majority lived in Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire and were known to them from various groups, such as the ufology group they attended and local ‘spiritualist circles’, or through their healing practices. I will examine what took place during the day, including the content of Shah’s speeches, but pay particular attention to the role of the audience in this and (on the basis of chats with people during coffee breaks, lunch and subsequent conversations) their reception and understanding of what occurred. When we entered the hall, Shah was chatting with the Spencers at a table at the far end, in front of which many rows of seats were laid out, as if for a public lecture. Many people had already arrived and were either sitting, primarily at the front, or perusing the leaflets and books laid out on three tables down one side of the room. Some were chatting and others were sitting or reading quietly; in fact, there seemed to be a considerable mixture in terms of those who had come on their own and those who had come with friends. Most were aged between about thirty and sixty; I was one of the youngest although there were a handful of others in their twenties. There were almost as many men as women, and nearly all attenders were white. The event began promptly at 10.00 am, with Shah sat quietly on a chair behind the front table, sipping water methodically and looking as if she was meditating. When the room had been quiet for a minute or two, she introduced herself and told us that ‘Commander Ashtar, one of the Ascended Masters’ wished to address us this morning. After a couple more minutes, she began to channel. The voice we heard whilst Shah was channelling was slower and more precise than when she was not. It came across as controlled, even when something that had just been said was being corrected, as frequently happened. This voice was monotonous and placid, the only noticeable difference in intonation being when a humorous remark was made – then it would become slightly quizzical, even (to my mind) patronizing. With regular pauses in the speech, there was little display of the emotions one might expect in a public lecture on such emotive subjects as the fate

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of humankind. Yet the very placidity of the voice gave an impression of calm care, not indifference, as shown by the reaction of her audience. ‘I love to bathe in the essence and vibration of your beings’, Ashtar told us. As Shah explained later, the Ascended Masters are beings that have evolved far beyond earthly physical existence. Ashtar’s role appeared to be that of a highly positioned cosmic administrator. He heads ‘Ashtar Command’, which at that time was organizing the Earth’s transition to ‘higher energy frequencies’, resulting in ‘evolutionary’ progression for humankind. Ashtar was one of the few Ascended Masters whom Shah habitually channelled, and he was highly complimentary to us. ‘You are all Masters in what you do,’ he said, ‘and worthy to receive the energies which will infuse the Earth over the next year.’ From the outset of his ‘communication’, as Shah called her channelled messages, it was clear that Ashtar held ‘great respect’, as he said, for everyone present. Ashtar’s respect may be linked to the content of his message. He told us that his work as an Ascended Master lay in ‘restructuring’ the Earth and humanity, so that each body may ‘be a totally different being . . . encompassing the greater light of God within and without’. This restructuring results from ‘light wave emanations permeating the planet’ on specific dates. The year before, there had been five such occasions but this year (1994) there were seven: Easter Sunday, the Summer solstice, the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, 11 January, 11 November (‘the 11–11’) and 12 December. Ashtar Command’s mission was to enable ‘ascension’ from our ‘physical bodies’ as a result of these emanations. Propagating its message and initiating humans’ action to help fulfil this mission was, he said, an important part of his work. As an Ascended Master, then, Ashtar had an intricate knowledge of the cosmos and humanity’s place in it. As humans, he said, ‘you are already a Master and encompass God … it is just that you do not realise this’. Furthermore, humans had both chosen and been chosen to be on Earth at that point in time so that we could work with the incoming energies for ascension. Thus, Ashtar respected us since we were embodiments of God and were participating in a hard mission. ‘Compared to you’, he said, ‘I have it easy.’ Ashtar informed us that humans had been ‘veiled’ from this choice so that we would not desert the mission. But now is the time – and the 1990s will be one of the most important decades in the history of the Earth – that these veils are being ‘lifted’ through ‘energy infusions’ sent by Ashtar Command. This means that humans will have greater consciousness and integration of dimensions higher than their present ‘third dimension’. Humans will begin to resume their ‘states of perfection once again’. ‘Lightworkers’ is the term used to describe those who will be woken from the ‘deception’ first. These people will display the ‘light of God’ within them, for the benefit of ‘awakening’ others, so that in time we can ‘welcome the New Age for planet Earth together’. In fact, some of these people will become, Ashtar said, ‘great leaders in, let me say, the New Age movement’. By implication, this included Shah, whose mission as a lightworker, as she described herself later, was to convey knowledge of the Masters’ plans to humanity. She told us that this workshop formed part of a nine-week ‘tour’, her longest since she had started channelling the Masters in 1988. Ashtar’s communication continued by informing us that the Masters are working in various ways with individuals and groups, especially channellers, to help this awakening. This is especially true during times of meditation, when knowledge

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is imparted to the ‘higher dimensions’ of the human. Although interference from a person’s ‘own self’ or even ‘false knowledge’ by other beings are possible, Ashtar said that scepticism should not be exercised to the extent that reception of true messages is blocked. Ashtar’s communication was followed by the opportunity to ask him questions, then a coffee break before Shah read a communication she had previously channelled from Lord Sananda, who acts as second in command at Ashtar Command, called The Law of Abundance or Abundance in Higher Consciousness. After an hour’s lunch break (there were drinks, snacks and sandwiches on sale, but many people had brought their own lunches), she channelled Sananda, whose communications especially concentrated upon how humans should work through their missions on Earth. He emphasized ‘grace’ as a gift from God, to whom we should ‘serve and surrender’, and as the force behind ‘love’ which strengthens the ‘faith’ needed in our missions. Through such faith will come prosperity or ‘abundance’. After another coffee break, there was a question-and-answer period directed to Shah herself about her work as a channeller, in which she showed slides of over a dozen Ascended Masters, illustrating her descriptions of their work with photographs or drawings of them. This was possible since each Master, with the exception of Ashtar, has at various times incarnated on Earth to help humans develop spiritually: Sananda was Jesus, and other Masters have been King Arthur, St Francis of Assisi and Shakespeare. Thus, Masters are not different in kind to humans, since everyone can, and will, attain their status at some point in time. This is because all have the ‘light of God’ within them and it is to a perfect state with God that all will eventually arrive. Audience responses Shah’s channelling should not be seen as a detached delivering of a message, but in part as a reaction to the audience. The Masters’ attitude of respect towards us meant that our appreciation and thoughts about their messages were important to them. This was displayed in the question-and-answer sessions that followed their communications and lasted equally as long, roughly forty minutes. The questioners were afforded the opportunity to explain what they meant in a detailed way and after their rather lengthy answers the Masters would ask if they had answered to the questioner’s satisfaction. On a few occasions, questioners continued expressing their own views. The Masters’ responses always directly addressed the question put to them, no matter how personal from the questioner’s point of view. In particular, they provided recognition of the questioners’ religious activities and biographies. The Masters emphasized that mission is individual, such that they cannot be generalized, nor can the sort of prosperity they will receive. ‘Simply by being the light that you are,’ Ashtar replied to one man who asked whether there was anything he should do to help ‘the Earth’, ‘you will be creating a whole within the law of oneness’ and thus ‘carrying out your mission’. The majority of questions to the Masters sought information about personal issues in relation to the themes of the communications, but many of them contained queries concerning how these contradicted their own experiences. I will highlight a number of questions and answers before turning to their significance. Some questions addressed specific points about people’s lives. For example, one woman reminded Ashtar that he had said our receptivity to the restructuring energies was

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not affected by where we were in the world, but she had been in Egypt recently and felt ‘electrified’ whilst there, whereas back in Britain, she told him, ‘I feel like I’m struggling again.’ The reason for this, Ashtar explained, was that she had touched upon a ‘past life sojourn’, because she had lived a previous incarnation in Egypt. Replying to one question about whether we should ‘trust in meditation’, Ashtar said it was one of the most important ways by which the Masters can communicate with us and that we should practise it each day, although there was no single correct way of meditating. Sananda explained that the visions one woman saw whilst meditating were from ‘higher realms’ not of her ‘own making’. Andrew Spencer asked Ashtar if we can help on the ‘physical plane’ with those suffering from ill-health, to which he received the reply that lending a ‘helping hand’ through love, understanding and compassion is important but that the experiences of health are lessons with which ‘you as a lightworker should not interfere’. In response to another question, Sananda said that ‘healers are just catalysts for people to heal themselves’, though if we do ‘take on’ the ‘karma’ of other people, ‘the Holy Spirit or God Spirit has grace to forgive you’ because our intentions were good. Mark asked whether the messages he had received through his own channelling experiences were ‘authentic’ or not. Ashtar replied that they were, for if he looked deeper into them, he would discover that ‘the mannerisms and character of them are not your own’. Mark responded that he ‘felt’ they had come from his ‘higher self’ and then asked why it was that, if his own communications were authentic, they differed from Ashtar’s with respect to the time-scale of ascension, which his own said would be much sooner than Ashtar had claimed. ‘Remember that there is a small measure of inaccuracy at times,’ replied Ashtar, so you must sift through your information and ‘feel what is truth for you.’ Mark did not reply to this. One woman asked why ‘the word “Avalon” has been going round my head for days’. Sananda told her that one Master, who had lived on Earth as King Arthur and with whom the woman had lived in a past life, lay behind this message and wished to connect with her ‘on inner planes’. This would lead the woman, Sananda said, to research into the Holy Grail and its representation as the ‘mother principle’ of God. Julie asked Ashtar why the date on which an asteroid would collide with Jupiter, which was a current news item and much speculated about in her ufology group, was not one of the significant days of the year, but thought afterwards that ‘he’ had ‘fudged’ the issue simply by repeating when the ‘major emanations’ would come. Two questions also addressed differences between Shah’s communications and other channelled communications. Andrew enquired whether there was a link between the ‘Council of Nine’ and the Masters. Ashtar responded that the former are just one group of the ‘Great White Brotherhood’, to which the Masters also belong but within which there are ‘specific focuses’. Another person asked if The Keys of Enoch reflected Ashtar’s message; this book was, said Ashtar, ‘one of the purest brought through’. Many in the audience had prior experience of channellers or mediums, through literature, workshops or groups, and saw their practice of meditation as a means by which knowledge could be gained. But they held different views on whether such knowledge came from the meditator him or herself, or from a separate being such as the Ascended Masters. In general, however, there was ambivalence about this issue. ‘I’m still not sure,’ Mark told me in a pub afterwards in response to my

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question about whether he thought Ashtar had been correct about the authenticity of his communications, ‘but perhaps it doesn’t matter.’ Mark, Christine and their friend, as well as others with whom I chatted during the day, did not seem amazed or excited about Shah’s communications, but intrigued and interested. Charles, a Londoner and the only black man at the workshop, had attended because of his interest in the writings of the Master Hilarion (Hilarion, 1989), which he recently had been reading and later lent me. My conversations with him at the workshop and at the London Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit later that year showed that he was not unduly concerned about differences between these various channelled discourses. Rather, he was more interested in discerning if these suggested whether or not he should continue attending Theosophical Society meetings, because he was not sure whether the current ‘spate’ of channellings – which seemed, he said, to ‘come from just about anybody’ – meant it was necessary these days to be involved in a group in which the emphasis was on ‘special people’ receiving knowledge from the masters. Likewise, those from the meditation group who attended the workshop talked about it for a long time afterwards, but less in terms of its revelations about cosmic plans rather than how it seemed to confirm or challenge their religious practices such as meditation, and their participation in various groups. Sheila’s workshop Sheila’s role Shah’s workshop can be compared with another that took place six months previously when the Spencers had organized for an Australian channeller, Sheila Patterson, to visit Nottinghamshire. The structure of the day and the audience was very similar to Shah’s workshop, except that Sheila did not channel. I attended the workshop with Anne, with who I had kept contact although I no longer attended the Anthroposophical group. We travelled to the workshop with two of her friends, also retired women. In her workshop, Sheila told us that she was in ‘constant communication’ with ‘the Masters’. She demonstrated this by stating that Archangel Michael was present in the room, with whom she proceeded to banter. The emphasis of her workshop, like Shah’s, was to empower everyone to act as the Masters they are already. Unlike Shah, however, Patterson was an active performer, speaking loudly with expansive gestures whilst standing. The jocular tone of the day was set out in the advertising leaflet: This workshop is designed to look at, in a lighthearted way, the Divine Plan for Earth, why we are here and to help awaken, activate, inform, release weariness and buried emotions, empower, align with Source and to discuss the final steps to going home and the reuniting of the Twin Souls. It is fast moving, informative, fun and suited to those who feel they are here to help at this special time of planetary evolution into Light. She [Sheila] hopes to assist you to perceive your own truth.

Sheila’s exposition of these themes was similar to Shah’s, but she also introduced material that set the tone of the day in quite a different manner. The evolution of humans through various dimensions of existence figured prominently in her talk, which included a wealth of specific details and events. Humans exist in the ‘third dimension’, she said, which is concerned with materialism, sex and control. However,

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at this moment in history everyone is making the decision whether or not to move to the ‘fifth’, a dimension of ‘higher vibration’ where time does not exist. Sheila gave everyone a pamphlet, The Divine Plan for Earth, telling us what we were and reminding us that ‘I am here in service to the light . . . I am here to assist the birth of a planet into the new dimensions . . . I am here to channel vast quantities of light onto the Earth plane . . . I am a multi dimensional Master . . . Now is the time to detach, as agreed, to fulfil my task and return home.’ This discussion of evolutionary potential, however, was complemented by considerable attention to the past history of life on Earth, a tale of ‘dark lords’ and Lucifer, of the rise and fall of ‘races’ and continents, of conflict and battles, and of the power of the Masters and God. In an earlier age, Sheila told us, a ‘dark Master’ named Lucifer had led other dark lords in the slaughter of the original inhabitants of the Earth, ‘a tall, blue-eyed, fair-skinned people’. But Michael had defeated and killed Lucifer and ‘lain his sword across the Earth’, repopulating it and allowing the progression to ascension to begin again. Sheila herself had played a role in this conflict. During the course of the workshop, she told us about her battle with the ‘dark forces’ to ‘reprogramme’ the ‘Atlantean computer’ that the ‘Lemurian race’ had built to enable ascension.3 The dark lords had interfered with this computer and Michael had given her the mission to fix it, for which task she needed to ‘take on’ a large Lemurian body that she said was extremely physically uncomfortable and tiring. To demonstrate this, she stomped about the front of the hall as if she were wearing a heavy, padded suit. Another remarkable example of Sheila’s importance to the history of human evolution was her claim that she had caused the percentage of ‘completion of karma’ for those on Earth to be reduced from 100 to 51 per cent. Karma was explained as being the amount of ‘debt’ accrued through previous past lives that must be paid back in order for the individual to evolve further or ascend. The notion of what sort of debt this is was not explained, but Sheila reduced the amount that needed to be paid back by challenging the ‘Karmic Board’ to incarnate on earth and try to complete 100 per cent of the karma they accrued by doing so. Because they failed in this, the amount was reduced. The insistence that each individual has undertaken to be part of a divine mission that is supervised by the Ascended Masters places Sheila’s cosmology alongside Shah’s. But she also developed an emphasis on explicatory detail that Shah did not. These differences of message were linked to her interaction with the audience. Even whilst channelling, Shah’s attitude was quiet and relaxed, reflected in the Masters’ respect for the audience. Sheila, though, acted in a different manner, establishing her audience’s enthusiasm by provocatively reminding them what they were. On several occasions she mentioned their power to create their own reality – ‘100 per cent of the time, all of the time’, she shouted – and that the truth within everyone is that ‘I am that I am’. At the end of the day she led everyone in dancing and chanting ‘Yes I am!’ for several minutes. Sheila’s attitude to her audience was, therefore, not one of quiet respect, but effervescent mobilization. The importance she attached to experience was also highlighted by the exercises in developing intuition that she taught us, which I discussed at the start of the first chapter.

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Audience responses Sheila’s workshop therefore set up a distinction with her audience, making her appear unapproachable, a sentiment expressed to me by several attenders. Their feeling was that they were being told things rather than having them suggested to them, and that they were cajoled rather than encouraged. Andrew Spencer later told me that he did not ‘feel drawn’ to Sheila but felt ‘over-powered’ by her, although it is important to note that he invited her back for another workshop the next year. Similarly, the information Shah gave her audience about herself was primarily concerned with how she became a channeller, with little discussion of traumatic experiences, but Sheila spoke at length about the extraordinary experiences and difficulties of her ‘mission’, placing her in a position of authority over, and detachment from, her audience, who had not experienced what she was talking about. Shah’s workshop focused around the Ascended Masters, whom she twice channelled during the course of the day, but Sheila, who did not channel, mentioned them less frequently. Sheila also allowed little formal input from her audience; in contrast to Shah’s workshop there was little time devoted to questions and answers. Despite such feelings towards Sheila, the audience reacted positively to the mood of the day. When she performed with particular gusto, there was much laughter, just as Sheila seemed to be enjoying herself, acting out her missions with a broad smile across her face. This was brought out in chats with people on the day of the workshop and on later occasions. Phyllis, one of the Essene meditators, gave a typical reaction: ‘She was really very funny, wasn’t she? I had such a good time, which I really needed, because I’d not had a very good week.’ Another said, ‘There were such a lot of amazing things to take in, but it was all done in such a good way, easy to follow.’ This attitude was also reflected in the general hilarity that accompanied the games Sheila taught her audience. Likewise, the audience enjoyed the chanting and dancing at the end of the day. Many remarked that it was a good way to end the workshop. During the short periods of question and answer that she did allow and the comments that people made afterwards, it appeared that most people wanted to find out how her revelations were affecting their religious lives. Andrew, for example, asked her how the incoming energies would help the ‘love’ that he brought to his therapies. Sheila said that they would strengthen them, but that it was important not to lose sight of oneself in dealing with others. Andrew replied that that was something to think about and of which to be aware. During one break, Julie drew my attention to Sheila’s remarks that Star Trek had insights into cosmic matters such as what other ‘planetary beings’ looked like, and principles of non-interference and co-operation. These tallied, she said, with what she and Andrew had heard at their ufology group and had recently read. At the meditation group soon after the workshop, Phyllis said she simply did not understand how Sheila could operate in more than one dimension at the same time, enabling her to be in India and Australia simultaneously as she had claimed. She did, however, think that this might come about through ‘higher development’. Some months later, after she had attended Shah’s workshop, Phyllis said there had been inconsistencies between the two channellers’ teachings, and so was keen to go to the later event which was to be given by Sheila, since this was advertised as a ‘question-and-answer’ session. Similarly, even as he was preparing to leave the leisure centre after Sheila had ended her workshop, the man who had intuited the word ‘roof’, discussed at the start of Chapter One, remarked how he

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was unsure about Sheila’s interpretation of it in terms of ascension which, he said, conflicted with his view that people are able to live better and better lives whilst still on Earth. Authority, legitimation and possession Authoritativeness and playfulness in channelling workshops These workshops show that channelling is not a dry deliverance of knowledge from Masters (or other supernatural beings) to humans, but a dynamic interaction between audience, channeller and Masters. The reaction of the audience showed that they were much more interested in relating the Masters’ communications to their current practices than in adopting its content in a systematic manner or subscribing to a particular channelling group, movement, discourse or identity. The Masters did not pass judgement on these practices, but sought to encourage them and draw parallels with their teachings. It is significant that having been invited by the Spencers and with the knowledge that their audience included some from the Spencers’s meditation group, Shah and Sheila drew especial attention to the benefits of meditation, linking this with people’s opportunities to connect to the Masters. Although participants queried the Masters’ communications, this did not result in protracted discussions or arguments with the Masters or channellers. Rather, participants probed for direction, guidance and confirmation of their practices. As a result, people’s practices received legitimation, although this was not tied to a commitment to follow or work with the channellers, or even the Masters in a private manner. Significantly, the channellers neither demanded nor expected such commitment. This legitimizing role must be linked to the channellers’ high degree of authority in their workshops. This was displayed in the authoritative nature of the Masters’ communications, the tone in which they were delivered, and the exalted role of the channeller in acting as a channel for them. Yet, rather than this authority being accepted by their audience, it was expressed within a specific context that may be described as playful. Sheila’s workshop in particular involved playful elements, such as her joking with the Masters and the games she taught to develop intuition. As Lindquist (2001) writes, play is a map with a feigned referent – in other words, play is pretence – but it is also self-referential, a time when people become absorbed in the activity performed. There are important respects in which these workshops established ludic social spaces because they referred participants to a pretended form of social authority (for a fuller account of play in these workshops, see Wood, 2001). Although Shah and Sheila acted authoritatively on behalf of the Masters, this was set within a context not of followers but of those who were interested. No social ties of enduring authority existed with the audience and thus any strong expressions of authority were suspect. The use of play was therefore a means to frame expressions of authority with scepticism and distrust. Playful elements therefore established boundaries within which the pretence of the channellers as strong leaders representing the Masters was temporarily accepted. It seems precisely because of this authoritativeness that channellers were the only figures in the network towards

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whom openly sceptical positions were taken, as seen in the Lovells’s remarks in the last chapter and Michael’s remarks in the next. Such scepticism was, however, always qualified in terms of a general acknowledgement that spirits do communicate through humans, which generally meant, in keeping with the lack of gossip, that individual channellers were not criticized. Although other practices in the Nottinghamshire network involved playful elements, they were not generally configured as ludic contexts in this sense, because they did not contain such authoritarian figures. The meditation group’s ritual, as we have seen, allowed the exercise of authority by the Lovells only in a circumscribed manner. These differences between practices mean that assertions, such as by Dumit (2001, pp. 63–5), that the ‘New Age Movement’ is all about play, need to be treated with some caution. The ambiguity inherent in ludic contexts, in which seriousness, trust and belief are disrupted, was articulated in a number of implicit ambiguities in the workshops. Whilst not articulated explicitly by the Masters, channellers or members of the audience, these were reflected in some of the comments regarding the workshops that have been considered already. So, whilst channellers and Masters acted authoritatively without themselves being legitimated, this lack of legitimation did not negate their ability to legitimize the religious practices of their audiences, but resulted in a subtle ambiguity in terms of discourses relating to internal and external authorities. This was expressed in Sheila’s view that we should always follow our instincts, for they are our connection to God: our ‘mantra’, she said, should be ‘Thy will, not my will’. Likewise, through Shah, Sananda told us that the ‘Higher God presence’ envelops and protects our ‘higher self’, so that we should ‘surrender’ to God. These ambiguities of authority confound a simplistic rendering of such phenomena in terms of self-religion or self-authority. The workshops articulated conceptions of selfhood partly in terms of obedience, faith, grace and a mapped development in terms of turning inwards. As such, selfhood was not deconstructed by being stripped of exterior injunctions, but addressed specifically through turning it towards received knowledge and teachings. This legitimizing role enabled by the playful nature of the channelling workshops helps to explain the eclecticism of channelled discourses. Shah’s identification of key dates for energies to be transmitted to the Earth (discussed also by Sheila), for example, shows that links are being made with Christianity (Easter Sunday) and paganism (the solstices and equinoxes). In addition, their workshops made links with Theosophical and Anthroposophical ideas of root races, Ascended Masters and human evolution. In his anthropological approach to channelling, Brown (1997, pp. 41–2) sees such eclecticism as ‘a kaleidoscopic reordering of traditional themes to suit the preoccupations of the moment’ or an ‘improvisation’ with institutional religion to meet ‘personal needs’. But by focusing on isolated workshops and the discourses of channellers, rather than contextualizing these in relation to their audiences, Brown is unable to explore who is doing this reordering and whether it is the needs of channellers or their audiences that are being met. This leads to his view of selves in the contemporary United States, where his study is carried out, as postmodern and thus fragmented and kaleidoscopic, requiring authentication and celebration of the sort that channelling provides (ibid., pp. 177–84). For Brown, channelling is a ‘celebration of self-expression’ (ibid., p. 12) and upholds the ‘key American idiom

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of sovereignty’ (ibid., pp. 41–2). If, instead, channelling is related to the context of audiences, then its eclecticism appears not as kaleidoscopic improvisation, but as the drawing in of religious traditions that figure in the lives of participants, enabling these lives to be legitimated. Thus, it is not the self that is authenticated or celebrated, but people’s practices and involvement with diverse authorities that are affirmed. This is a crucial difference to make, because Brown makes the common methodological and theoretical error that just because channelling includes discourse about self-authority, it is a form of religion in which participants’ self-authority trumps external authorities. A socially contextualized study, however, shows that this discourse is woven around discourses concerning other authorities, including not only the channellers’ and Masters’ own authorities but also the authorities of participants’ other religious practices. That these practices relate to participants’ selves is a truism, but they also relate to other social authorities with which they are involved – this is fundamentally missed if analysis emphasizes the celebration of the self. However, as a result of the relativization of authorities in nonformative regions of the religious field, participants at channelling events (including even the channellers themselves) are involved with different practices from one another, such that there is a high degree of individualization. Consequently, the legitimization the channellers provide cannot be discursively directed at narrow concerns, but must be broad and relatively indiscriminate – although they could focus upon specific practices, such as meditation, due to knowledge about their audience. New Age studies, then, mistake this individualization and responses to it for self-authority and its celebration, rather than seeing it as resulting from involvement with multiple but relativized social authorities. The perspective I have provided better enables an understanding of the way in which knowledge was presented by channellers and audience reactions to this knowledge. Channellers drew upon different religious traditions in a decontextualized manner, eschewing explicit reference to Christian, pagan or Theosophical traditions or to background information on the themes they drew from these. As we have seen, traditions and themes were drawn upon and juxtaposed in a rapid and bewildering variety of ways. Even the underlying ideas of channelling, akin to the ‘basic assumptions’ described by Brown (1997, pp. 47–50), were not articulated in a coherent manner; rather, the Masters and channellers launched their audiences into, as it were, the middle of stories that were already highly developed. Yet the audience did not react with bewilderment; instead, they engaged with the Masters and channellers through the qualified seriousness appropriate to ludic contexts; that is, their engagement was playful. Christine The legitimizing role of these channelling workshops could, however, have a more significant influence on participants’ lives. This situation may be explored in the life of one of the regular attenders of the meditation group, Christine, who was particularly affected by Shah’s workshop. In this workshop, Christine asked Sananda about a recent dream in which she was floating near Saturn and been given information which she forgot once awake. Sananda revealed that she had indeed

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been to Saturn, invited there by the planet’s ‘tribunal council’, and learned about what was to happen on Earth in the future. Because part of her was not ready for this information, he said, the council veiled it from her consciousness so that she could assimilate it gradually. Christine seemed satisfied with this answer; there was opportunity to continue the discussion with Sananda, yet she chose not to. In the pub afterwards she talked about how Sananda had confirmed things she ‘felt’ about herself recently, as if she were about to learn ‘something important’. Whilst Mark related this to environmental changes, that is, to changes ‘within the Earth’ rather than outside it as in the Masters’ communications, Christine was more inclined to focus upon planetary or cosmic shifts. I followed the effects of this revelation to Christine over the ensuing months and, through conversations and an interview, was able to build a picture of how it fitted into her life. Christine, a 36-year-old divorcee employed as a secretary in a local small business firm, told me that she had started to channel the Master Kuan Yin after Shah’s workshop, although even before then she had ‘felt the presence’ of the Ascended Masters and seen ‘images’ of them in her mind, including during the meditation meetings, especially after attending Sheila’s workshop. Kuan Yin was one of the 13 Masters Shah talked about in her workshop, describing her as a ‘Chinese lady’ taught by the Buddha and who, as a Master, focuses on the healing of women and children. Christine’s channelling occurred a number of times whilst she was meditating on her own. She had channelled, she said, ‘verbal information’ corroborating Shah’s communications, but had neither written this down nor told many people about it. It is pertinent to note that Christine’s other lasting impression of Shah’s workshop was that she had predicted Easter Sunday of that year to be a day when the Masters were sending new energies to Earth, because that was the day already chosen by Christine to have her two young children ‘christened’, as she put it, in a non-Christian ceremony. Of those at the meditation group, she talked about her own channelling only with Mark, the Lovells and the Spencers. At one meditation meeting, her channelling experiences arose in conversation with the Spencers and myself, who were enthusiastic and said they showed that more and more people really were being ‘opened up to energies’. Yet, according to Christine, they never asked her either to reveal details about the content of her messages or to channel for them. Two months after starting to channel, Christine said she was thrown into emotional turmoil concerning its validity and benefits, eventually deciding to stop altogether. Now she spoke with disdain about channellers, who she described as ‘jumping onto a bandwagon’ with their egos. ‘There is,’ she said, ‘too much glamour involved.’ Christine took this view on the basis of a number of different sources, which she discussed with me, the main one being Steiner’s warnings against entertaining spirits that could in fact be Luciferic. According to Steiner (1986, p. 147), Luciferic beings are ‘those physical beings who have remained behind at an earlier stage of evolution’ and are thus not to be trusted with regard to ‘higher knowledge’ in spiritual development. Christine said she had been reading some of Steiner’s writings and talking about his ideas with a number of friends who knew about them, such as the Lovells, who had originally introduced her to his ideas.

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Christine also spoke about three other influences on her new distrust of channelling. One was an idea taken from a lecture she had attended on ‘Aquarian energies’. According to Christine, the lecturer had said that if knowledge of such matters was sought, people should turn directly to ‘God himself’ rather than to lower spiritual beings. Christine interpreted this as meaning that she should look ‘inward’ for knowledge, ‘where God is found’, not ‘outward into space’ to ‘find’ Ashtar Command. The second involved Buddhist teachings that Christine had been reading on Mark’s suggestion, which informed her that ‘spiritual progress’ was ‘hard work’. She contrasted this to channelling, which she said did not require ‘discipline’. Thirdly, she expressed the view that thoughts could create autonomous beings, such that if channelling was just the imagination at work, it could have all kinds of harmful consequences, which again was something the Lovells often spoke about in terms of ‘thought forms’. An understanding of Christine’s channelling experiences must take into consideration these diverse influences, including the authority of the Lovells and the Spencers at the meditation group. This was the only group she regularly attended, although she frequently engaged with other practices such as astrology, and events such as lectures and workshops. The influence of the Spencers can be seen in the dream she described in which she floated near Saturn and was told important things, in Shah’s explanation of that dream, and in her subsequent channelling of Kuan Yin. Here, she seemed concerned with personal mission and change of the sort the Spencers frequently talked about; indeed, Christine described her channelled knowledge as ‘radical’ and ‘new’. But her multifaceted critique of channelling and eventual rejection of it was influenced by the Lovells’s views on the need to accept one’s own abilities, such as contacting God directly for knowledge, and to strive for harmony and stability. It was this latter influence that prevailed, although only after throwing her into turmoil concerning the validity of her channelling. The Lovells were important as they clearly had a special place in Christine’s life, standing as ‘godparents’ for her children in their christening ceremony. Although they did not attend any of the channelling events and held an openly sceptical opinion of channelling, without however criticizing the specific channellers invited by the Spencers, the Lovells played a role in her reinterpretation of this ceremony from one legitimated by Shah’s communications regarding the significance of Easter Sunday to one that emphasized, as she put it, the ‘specialness’ of that day each year. This shift, however, was due neither to radically new experiences nor to experiences completely contrary to channelling. Christine already had some knowledge of Anthroposophical and Buddhist teachings, as well as being familiar with the Lovells’s points of view. Yet these also resonated in many ways with the channelling workshops, such as the use of Theosophical knowledge about human evolution and the identification of Kuan Yin as a Buddhist. This was also true of the Aquarian energies lecture’s focus on how the Earth would change through incoming energies. According to Christine, the lecturer had talked about the realignment of the Earth to a different axis, which was to happen that year, resulting in a realignment of humans’ spinal columns, making us more upright in posture (although with the unfortunate result that we would become more susceptible to skin reactions). Thus, although the Spencers’s authority was bound up with the legitimation that channelling conferred

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on Christine’s burgeoning experiences of the Masters, and the Lovells’s with a shift away from this, neither couple could be described as having influenced Christine in a formative manner, for there were too many other authorities at work in her religious life. Her channelling career, short though it was, cannot be regarded as being shaped by any particular tradition or authority. Christine’s story does not end there, of course. About eighteen months after ending my fieldwork with the meditation group, I met Christine at the Nottinghamshire religious fair I was then studying (see Chapter Six). She was holding a stall for a group named Hundredth Monkeying!, which she explained was an ongoing project whereby people into all sorts of ‘spiritual activities’ could link through meditation in order to change the world. The group used the motto ‘An inner aid project to help midwife our world through needed global evolutionary changes’ and Christine was selling information packs that explained in more detail what they did and invited people to join. According to this pack, Hundredth Monkeying! runs ‘inner aid retreats . . . which . . . focus on consciously building up an intensive energy-field, strong and clear enough to get through to people in need or to influence the collective psychological programming underlying human actions’ (Jenkins, 1996, p. 3). Christine told me that Hundredth Monkeying! holds retreats for one week each summer at Glastonbury; the first was in 1995 when 130 people attended. Christine had attended the 1995 and 1996 retreats where, she said, ‘everyone does what they want’. After attending the first one she had in fact left the meditation group, but this was not, she said, a rejection of the group and its practices rather than her wish to become involved with a group that was ‘more satisfying’ to her. When I asked what she now thought about channelling, Christine replied it was not ‘right’ for her, but she knew, and had attended camp with, people who did channel. Yet a simplistic rendering of her religious history in terms of development along formative lines is negated by the important role of both channelling and meditation in this group. The founder and author of its information pack was none other than Palden Jenkins, one of the compilers of The Only Planet of Choice, the channelled text that the Spencers had often talked about and lent to meditators, including Christine. Jenkins (1996, p. 4) specifically viewed Hundredth Monkeying! as a group active in following the instructions of the Council of Nine for people to become involved with each other as the ‘New Age’ is created on Earth in order to address environmental and psychic problems. To achieve this, meditation was central (ibid., pp. 17–18). So, although she had started and then ceased to channel, Christine’s religious history remained involved with, and influenced by, this practice. The case of Christine is not very different from someone like Shah who eventually becomes a publicly recognized channeller. The information Shah provided during her workshop about how she came to channel also shows the nonformative influence of other channellers and of channelling groups. Like Christine, Shah began to channel after attending a channelling workshop and whilst attending a meditation group, but had no subsequent contact with the channeller who led it. Instead, as her proficiency in channelling slowly developed, she saw herself as aligned with what she called the ‘ascension movement’ comprised of channellers proclaiming the Ascended Masters’ teaching about ascension. Although I was only able to talk to Shah for a few minutes at the end of her workshop, from her comments and from the Spencers’s information

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about her, it seemed that she had not trained with any channeller or channelling group, but simply recognized the similarities between the communications the Masters delivered through her and through others. Nor had any group subsequently formed around her, although it was possible to sign up for a monthly newsletter that contained information about her tours and new communications from the Masters; however, only the Spencers from the meditation group did so. Similar comments apply to Sheila, although she also later produced a website to convey her messages. The main difference between Shah’s and Christine’s channelling experiences seemed to lie in the growing public recognition of the former’s abilities. Whilst the Spencers were interested in Christine’s experiences, neither they nor others constituted an audience for her practice or communications. Shah, however, told us that she shared her communications with her two closest female friends who were also in her meditation group, and that it was in front of them that she first verbally channelled. This suggests that people’s practices within nonformative contexts are not necessarily short-lived or fail to become important in their lives, as shown also by the Lovells’s and Spencers’s healing practices. Rather, they do not come to exert formative influence over practitioners’ lives, but remain relativized through continued engagement with other authorities. My information on channellers such as Shah and Sheila, but also on other channellers such as the friend of the Spencers mentioned in the last chapter whose typed manuscript relating his experiences and messages they lent to people, suggests a similar situation: although they became publicly recognized and grew in competence as channellers, neither this practice nor those channellers or channelling groups with whom they were in contact (if at all) was formative. Rather, these continued to be juxtaposed alongside other quite different religious authorities. However, this is not to argue that such people did not perceive and describe themselves as channellers (or lightworkers, in the cases of Shah and Sheila), but that such labels were used strategically alongside others. Nor is it to argue that such practices and authorities were insignificant, for practitioners’ lives or more widely, or doomed to disappear; it is merely to describe the manner of their operation within these networks. Furthermore, I am not claiming that such practices and their associated authorities were not related to others, but that rather than together constituting a formative influence, they interacted to relativize each other. The centrality of possession At this point, some attention needs to be paid to why channelling as a particular sort of practice is able to legitimize other religious practices. This issue can be linked with the information on the life histories of the Lovells and the Spencers discussed in the last chapter, for it appears that one category of practice recurred at important junctures in their lives, orientating and legitimizing their religious practices. For these two couples, contact with mediums and spiritualist groups marked significant points in the narration of their life histories, even though these narratives then expressed criticisms and dissatisfactions with such contact. Likewise, at the time of my research, contact with channellers had become important for the Spencers, although they retained a critical attitude. The importance of contact with mediums, shamans

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and channellers is further demonstrated in the next two chapters. Spirit possession was therefore a category of practice of particular significance in the network, through such forms as mediumship, channelling and shamanism. Furthermore, those religious traditions that existed on the boundaries of the network were themselves traditions centrally involving possession: spiritualism, Theosophy and paganism. My categorization of these practices as spirit possession invokes an ongoing anthropological debate about possession, shamanism, trance and ecstasy, particularly in response to Lewis’s (2003 [1971], pp. 32–58) comparative study (see Atkinson, 1992; Boddy, 1994; Jakobsen, 1999, pp. 1–17; Lambek, 1989). For my purposes, I wish merely to make connections between diverse practices in which there is a belief that a bodily connection has been made with supernatural beings, in other words in which such beings are apprehended sensorily. This definition does not require that trance has been entered (although that is arguable in the case of Shah, for example), or that a person’s body has been invaded or self-control lost (again as for Shah, who explicitly described herself as ‘somersaulting backwards’ out of her body when she ‘channelled’ the Masters). My use of the term ‘possession’ may therefore be thought to be too loose, yet I believe it is useful to retain the term since actual bodily possession is central to these practices – thus, although Sheila was not, strictly speaking, possessed by the Masters, but could see and interact with them, her ability to do so was based upon her regular experience of them possessing her to deliver communications. Except for artificial heuristic purposes, I see no reason to separate her practice during possession with her practice such as during her channelling workshop – for her, they seemed to function as just different instances of her ongoing bodily contact with the Masters. I am therefore in favour of Greenwood’s (2000, p. 142) approach, regarding ‘shamanism’, not to separate times when people are believed to be possessed by spirits from when they are expressing connections and communications with them in other ways. The significance in the Nottinghamshire network of practices of possession may be understood, then, in terms of their unique role in enabling direct contact or, as Lewis (2003, p. 51) puts it, ‘communion’ with supernatural beings, including their knowledges and powers. Even in nonformative regions of the religious field contact with supernatural beings is paramount, but it does not function as capital that is contested. This is important to recognize because the other practices in the network could be practised in a secular manner. My discussion of the meditation group in the last chapter and discussion of the religious fair in the next shows that these practices could be grouped into three categories: healing, divination and meditation (or other forms of relaxation or visualization). The proliferation and popularization of techniques in each category has occurred as much in secular fields as in the religious field. To bear meaning in the religious field, these techniques therefore must be related to religious capital, in other words to relations with supernatural beings, and this is achieved through being legitimated by the spirit possessed or through the individual’s own practice of possession. This legitimation, however, is not of a formative nature – the possessed do not, and do not seek to, shape people’s practices of these techniques. Legitimation is therefore episodic and often transitory, as well as involving a plethora of legitimators, including channellers, shamans and mediums. Hence, people in the network were involved with, and sought, such legitimation

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because they were still involved in the religious field – their practices had meaning for them and were believed to be powerful because of their religious nature. Thus, healers such as the Lovells and the Spencers talked about the religious beliefs that lay behind their healing practices, even if they did not tell some clients about these. Likewise, their and others’ life history narratives continually emphasized religious experiences, such as early churchgoing and later contact with mediums. Although in these other practices communion with supernatural beings were sometimes experienced, such as in meditation or, as shown in the next chapter, in the healing practice of Reiki, it was only in practices of possession that this was guaranteed. This also helps explain the form of communion with spirits in channelling as speech since it was through verbal remarks that participants’ other practices could receive legitimation. This shows that the social role of channellers was quite different from that of the possessed in other parts of the religious field, where the possessed address illness, affliction, misfortune, or the restoration of social order (Atkinson, 1992, p. 314; Lewis, 2003, p. 23), which requires the exercise of authority in a formative manner, particularly as it relates to kinship, group or local communities. In addition, speech served the role of legitimating in a manner consonant with the class position of most practitioners. In the last chapter, I discussed the professionalized workingclass position of those in the network. One characteristic of this is involvement with discourses that attempt to portray professionalism through precision and logic. The growth of managerial discourses amongst these positions, coupled with relatively high levels of education, means that such discursive attributes are highly valued. Similar religious discourses are thereby better able to act in a legitimating fashion. This is perhaps one of the most noticeable features of channellers’ discourses – they are strongly pedantic and seek to establish truths through logic and evidence. Speaking through Shah, for example, Ashtar continually repeated the phrase ‘that which is’ in order to make his meaning precisely clear, as well as regularly correcting himself and stopping sentences half way through to make his point in a clearer manner. This may be coupled with the slow and steady manner in which he spoke, displayed also by the Lovells during the meditation rituals. Of significance too was information provided in the Masters’ discourses, for their explanations of plans, dates and command centres bore a strong resemblance to managerial structures and actions. Since such speech resonated with existing values amongst participants, it provided a basis for the legitimating role of spirit possession for other practices. Two things are apparent from this discussion of the centrality of possession. Firstly, scholarly emphasis on the authority of the self is again contested since possession explicitly connects people to authorities considered by them as external and usually of great stature and power, such that even if these teach a doctrine of self-authority, sociological analysis must surely consider the power relationships connecting people to them. This point holds even more for the possessed, since they are seen unambiguously as having their very selves taken over by an external being. It is probably because of scholars’ emphasis on self-authority in contemporary Euro-American religion that spirit possession is so often neglected, although less so by anthropologists. Possession is not only central to those phenomena classed as New Age, but also, as discussed in Chapters Seven and Eight, to paganism and Pentecostalism. Scholars generally only recognize the existence of possession

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amongst Euro-American populations deemed to be less self-reflexive than the white middle-class, such as in working-class spiritualism or black Christian churches. My study, however, shows that possession is found throughout classes and ethnicities, thereby contesting theories about self-authority. Secondly, possession raises an ambiguity for the nonformative nature of authority in these networks, since the supernatural beings and those they possess are held to have a high degree of authority, power and knowledge, at the same time as such authority is relativized not only in their audiences’ lives, but also in the lives of those they possess. There is no need to explain away this ambiguity: as I explained in Chapter Three, the religious field, within which these nonformative regions exist, is marked by relations with supernatural beings, which are therefore also found in these regions. The peculiarity of these regions is that conflict over religious capital, namely over relations to these beings, is absent. Hence there was neither contestation over access to them or over their knowledges or powers, nor the formation of charismatic authority that, as Weber (1968) explains, embeds prophets or other charismatics within groups of adherents and attendant organizational structures. Similarly, this means that there was little concern with what I have called the ‘means of possession’ (Wood, 2003) that marks practices of possession in more formative regions of the religious field, as I will explore in Chapters Seven and Eight. Whilst channellers did not attempt to control, manage or teach others learning to channel, those in more formative religious traditions of spiritualism, Theosophy and paganism on the boundaries of the network did so. The lack of control over channelling did not result, then, from an ideology of self-authority or democracy, as Brown (1997) believes, but from the conditions of regions of the field in which it existed. This lack of contestation over the means of possession explains the individualized nature of how people came to channel and their subsequent developments. Lewis’s (1996, pp. 105–21; 2003) comparative studies explore the career of the possessed, tracing the influence of social authorities and organizations upon the cessation of possession, such as through exorcism, or its regularization through the possessed learning to master the spirits. Both routes involve others recognized as having mastered spirits, who Lewis labels shamans, in other words authoritative religious masters who, instead of having their authority relativized as in the case of channelling in the Nottinghamshire network, are able formatively to shape the possessed’s experiences and sense of self. This is not to claim that their authority is not contested, such as by rival shamans or by those in another part of the religious field such as priests who may conduct exorcisms, but that there are areas of the religious field in which their authority is formative. This is shown especially in the regularization of possession, where the possessed develops a possession career, usually within an organizational setting, by slowly learning a set of dispositions – in other words a religious habitus – through training by the shaman, identification with who may result in taking their place when they die or retire. The nonformative nature of channellers’ authority, by contrast, means that developments in a person’s channelling (that is, possession) experiences are not shaped in a regularized form, except for the basic shift from what Lewis (1996, p. 118) calls ‘involuntary’ possession to ‘voluntary’ possession in which the possessed can control what spirits possess him or her, and when. This shift really appears simply as the replication, through minimal contact such as in

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a workshop or from a book, of channellers’ abilities to channel a particular spirit at a particular time. This also means that exorcism makes no sense in this context – channellers play no role in curing people from unwanted involuntary possession. In highlighting the centrality of spirit possession in the Nottinghamshire network, a number of other issues are simultaneously raised, such as the epidemiology of possession, which will be addressed in Chapter Eight. In that chapter, I will explore the association of possession with status ambiguity, rather than status deprivation, by drawing upon a body of literature that challenges some of Lewis’s views. In relation to that, I will investigate the links between religious practice and class positions in the Nottinghamshire network to which I have already begun to draw attention, and make comparisons with other forms of religion characterized by spirit possession in the contemporary world. The next chapter presents new material for these issues by turning to my second major site of fieldwork in the network, a religious fair. Notes 1 ‘Spirit possession’ is itself a contested concept in sociological and anthropological literature, which I will discuss later in this chapter. 2 My pseudonym for this channeller reflects the monosyllabic name she used. Shah described herself as a ‘channeller’ and her activities as ‘channelling’, descriptions that were also used by her audience. 3 As discussed in Theosophical traditions (see Steiner, 1986, pp. 91–6) this is one of the ‘root races’ of humankind whose temptation by Lucifer led to evil but also to the possibility of freedom, and whose descendants populated Atlantis.

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Chapter Six

The Nottinghamshire fair The last two chapters focused on the meditation group and channelling workshops in the Nottinghamshire network, but attention now moves on to another organization, a monthly fair. This fair brought together lecturers, workshop leaders and stallholders covering a wide variety of religious practices. As with previous chapters, discussion proceeds by considering data from participant observation alongside key informants’ narrated life histories, to explore how events were embedded in wider social contexts. I start by describing the fair and exploring issues of authority, in order to highlight its nonformative nature and the prevalence of practices of spirit possession, mostly in the form of spiritualism. I then seek to contextualize this within the history and organization of the fair by discussing the life history of its founder, Michael. Attention then focuses on three friends (Sally, Noel and Beth), former attenders at the meditation group who held stalls and gave lectures on various healing therapies at the fair. In particular, I explore their interest in Reiki, one of the most popular therapies at the fair, and consider its similarities to channelling to suggest that its practice can be considered as a form of possession. The strong presence of spiritualism and my research with one medium, Alvin, at the fair leads into the next chapter, which examines more formative religious traditions on the edges of the network. The fair’s activities and founding Authority at the fair Producers and consumers The fair had been running for over a year by the time I undertook fieldwork in summer and autumn 1996. During this time it had changed its name twice, but continued to be held in a small town-centre hotel one Sunday each month. I call it a fair rather than a festival because the latter usually refers to larger scale gatherings held over a number of days, such as the Glastonbury Festival or the London Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit. At peak times there were about one hundred and fifty attenders, with approximately equal numbers of men and women. Despite the strongly multiethnic nature of Nottingham the vast majority of these were white; around a dozen black and Asian people attended each time, although none of these held stalls, gave lectures or led workshops. There were around twenty stalls held by people from throughout the English Midlands, selling goods or offering sessions for clients, as well as ten speakers throughout the day giving lectures lasting half an hour in a hall that could hold about sixty people. Four longer sessions of instruction in healing therapies, lasting an hour and a half and held in a separate room, began towards the end of the summer. The fair was invariably busy, despite the stalls being

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set up in only two large rooms, and although some of the lectures were attended by as few as 15 people, others were so popular that there was standing room only. Running from 10.00 am to 6.00 pm, the entrance price was less than £2 and even cheaper for children and pensioners; lectures were free and the longer sessions each cost no more than £5. I learned about the fair through Michelle, a close friend of its founder Michael, and initially attended with Anne, with whom I had kept in touch during the 18 months’ break since the end of my participation at the meditation group. After beginning research again by interviewing Michelle, I attended the fair and renewed contact there with a number of the meditators and various people from other events. I was able to conduct fieldwork easily since it was a relatively informal affair. Producers would often take breaks to peruse stalls or have a drink, providing plenty of opportunity for me to make myself known to them. In this way, I became well acquainted with some of the more regularly attending participants, including Michelle, Michael and Alvin, as well as those I already knew from other fieldwork sites: Anne, Christine, Sally, Noel and Beth. Through these informal chats and subsequent interviews, I was able to build up a general picture of the way people approached and viewed the fair. Although I was initially overwhelmed by the variety at the fair (a response also admitted by others), after attending a few times I began to gain an understanding of its structure, in terms of what was popular, such as spiritualism, and absent, such as new religious movements. To some extent, as will be considered later, this related to the interests of Michael, but also to the strength or weakness of religious traditions in the specific geographical area. Spiritualism, for example, was traditionally strong in the East Midlands and features in Michael’s biography, whereas many new religious movements appeared to have a weak presence, unlike in areas containing larger and more cosmopolitan cities. Most of the producers at the fair could be classed in one of three categories, a categorization that, when I talked about it with Michael, he seemed to agree with, although he also said there were ‘quite a few oddball characters’ and ‘miscellaneous’ people. The most popular category in terms of consumer interest was spiritualists. Their lectures were the most heavily attended, often leaving standing room only in the hall, and consultations at their stalls were booked up throughout the day. During these consultations, which lasted about twenty minutes and would cost between £5 and £10, single clients sat opposite the mediums, who did not become bodily possessed by spirits but claimed to be in contact with them to receive information about their clients’ lives. Most mediums used some system of clairvoyance, most commonly Tarot cards, to interpret their clients’ troubles, fears or hopes and to offer advice in the form of the difficulties and opportunities of various courses of action. The spirits used in this way were the mediums’ personal spirit helpers, with whom they had built up a long-term close personal relationship, but they could also become aware of and communicate with other spirits, including deceased relatives of their clients. After this clairvoyance, the mediums would often spend some minutes in silence holding their clients’ hands in order to channel healing energy to them. Secondly, healers were the most numerous of the three categories, making use of abstract techniques of healing although their competence was also represented in terms of their personal biographies, which tended to include a religious component.

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The most common techniques were Reiki, crystals, aromatherapy and flower essences, although the manner in which these were taught and employed often overlapped, as will be discussed further on. At their stalls, healers not only gave advice and sold literature on therapies, but also carried out short healing sessions, lasting about ten minutes, for a fee usually of no more than £5. These were used to demonstrate the benefits of the therapy and thus of future sessions, since the majority of these producers offered therapies at local healing centres or in their own homes. Lastly, cosmologists comprised the smallest but most diverse category, ranging from religious traditions such as Buddhism to those promoted by individuals. These focused upon accounts of the place of humans in a wider universe of forces and plans, also often including their personal religious journey in discerning and accepting this knowledge. On one occasion, for example, the following could be listed: talks on Buddhism by a local Buddhist monk who described himself as a ‘Maitreya’, on the Aquarian Age, on Mayan cosmology and on Omniology (see Lomas, 1996), and stalls on feng shui and on astrology. Although cosmologists ran relatively few stalls, these were used to promote literature, groups and practices. The sorts of services and products on offer at the fair therefore varied between producers, whose relative popularity will be addressed further on. Some of the healers and cosmologists came from local enterprises and promoted their ongoing services. These included a floatation tank centre and a reflexology clinic, for the former, and courses in ‘practical philosophy’ and feng shui consultations, for the latter. Half a dozen of the stalls sold books covering topics related to all three categories of producers from businesses across the English Midlands. Those who held these were also usually practitioners themselves and would use any talks or workshops they gave as an opportunity to promote certain books. Whilst the spiritualists did not tend to publicize businesses, the consultations they gave at their stalls did promote the need for further private consultations. This was also common for the healers, whose displays of healing power were explained to clients to be only an initial taste of what should be carried on over a longer period. According to many producers, however, only a very small number of consumers followed up their experiences at the fair with future services. Indeed, economic matters were claimed to be of secondary importance by most producers at the fair: a number of healing sessions were given free or at minimal cost, lecturers were not paid, and stallholders and workshop leaders had to hire their spaces. The fair therefore primarily served other purposes than generating income for many of the producers. In particular, it provided an opportunity for them to disseminate knowledge about their beliefs and practices, as well as to display and legitimize their religious authority. Additionally, producers themselves used the fair as consumers, browsing the stalls and even attending lectures or workshops, and it can thus be seen as part of their ongoing religious activities. In this sense, the distinction between producers and consumers became confused, especially as producers’ authorities’ could only be exercised in an ambiguous way at their own stalls, lectures or workshops, as I will describe. In its regularity, the fair can be seen as a group or organization like other groups in the network, since through frequent attendance people encountered many of the same producers and consumers. At least six producers gave lectures more than once

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at the fair during my fieldwork and many more were found to nearly always have a stall there. Although I carried out no quantitative study, the recurrence of producers indicates that beyond its organizational running the fair established itself as a group. This view was supported by Michael, who told me about the significant number of regular participants he knew or had come to know through the fair, and by the information he gave me about the regular invitations he extended to some producers. As my fieldwork progressed, I increasingly heard comments about the fair similar to those I had heard at other groups, describing the value and interest it held for people. They looked forward to its next meeting, expressing wishes to ‘try out’, as Michelle put it, things for which they had so far not had time. Legitimation and ambiguity This description of the fair shows that authority there should be seen as becoming established and situated within an ambivalent and contested context, comparable to that at the meditation group and channelling workshops. This was reflected in producers’ ambiguous positionings as special but also ordinary. As one of the mediums who regularly gave lectures and held a stall at the fair said in a lecture, ‘There’s nothing more normal than healing – it’s not paranormal, anyone can do it.’ He explained that because of this, he called himself a ‘healing channel’ rather than a ‘spiritual healer’, to emphasize the fact that the people who heal are as important as that which heals through them. At the same time, however, he took pains to establish his credentials by telling us that he and his wife had been members of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers for ten years and that he had been active on the ‘spiritualist circuit’ alongside Matthew Manning, a healer known nationally for his television appearances, books and tours (his national ‘No Faith Required’ tour had come to Nottingham in 1995). He also told us about the spirit who uses him as a channel to heal, a Doctor Jameison who died in 1869 and whose existence he had verified by checking municipal records. Thus, although this medium’s talk universalized the ability to heal, it also served to distinguish him from his audience. This ambiguous establishment of authority was common also for cosmologists. During his lecture on Omniology, in response to my question on whether his system was purely theoretical or included practical elements, Lomas said, ‘Each person grows to the divine in their own way – you can’t tell others what to do.’ Yet his talk, entitled ‘Transformational Knowledge’, set out a system of the universe in a highly didactic manner, based upon the notion that there is a dual evolution of that which is ‘base’, such as lying and cheating, and of that which is ‘not base’, such as love and compassion. This duality, he said, becomes manifested as ‘Itheshe’ that encompasses the elements in the universe of ‘it’, ‘he’ and ‘she’. As well as expounding his cosmology, Lomas’s lecture focused on how he had gradually developed the cosmology of Omniology at certain times in his life, in relation to personal crises and religious experiences at various groups. Most questions to Lomas, however, addressed not his cosmological scheme but its relevance to questionners’ own practices and beliefs. One woman, for example, asked him whether he had received this information through ‘channelling’ for she knew that ‘channellers’ often addressed ‘good and evil’. Lomas replied he had not, although ‘deep meditation’ had helped him ‘perceive’ its ‘truth’. The most extreme attempt at authoritative positioning during my time of research at the fair

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was that by the Buddhist monk, who claimed to be the only ‘Buddha’ in the world at the present time, a statement that elicited laughter from about half of those present at his lecture (which was very well attended) and numerous mocking comments in private. This discussion shows that whilst the fair provided opportunities to experience and learn about different religious practices, this marketplace feature was situated within encounters with various authorities that enabled not only learning about other practices but also the legitimization of participants’ existing practices. Thus, although on the surface the fair appeared as a marketplace to sell commodified products, this understanding fails properly to take into consideration participants’ embroilments with authorities. One consequence of this consideration is that any treatment of this fair, or others like it, as a religious (or spiritual) site for the enactment of the sovereignty of religious (or spiritual) consumers, is misleading. I criticized such theoretical positions in Chapter Three, but this study of the fair demonstrates this criticism in a concrete manner, especially as fairs are often viewed as exemplary forms of the New Age marketplace, as in Hamilton’s (2000) study of the London Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit. Although Hamilton provides useful data on the products available at this market, the regularity of attendance, and attenders’ involvement in other activities, such quantitative information alone cannot tell us participants’ manner of involvement in the Festival. Yet their manner of involvement is assumed by Hamilton (ibid., pp. 194–5) to relate to support for ‘the plausibility structure of the alternative and New Age subculture’ by being ‘at the centre of the process by which it becomes self-aware and a movement’. Since Hamilton provides no evidence or qualifications as to why he calls this subculture ‘New Age’ (and simultaneously introduces its description as ‘alternative’ without considering whether or how these differ), or as to why this subculture is conscious of itself as a ‘movement’, his analysis replicates, once more, the vagueness and reification exhibited by New Age studies on the basis of decontextualized analysis. A contextualized account of the Nottinghamshire fair is now further explored through the involvement of a number of participants, including its founder. The founding of the fair Michael’s life history Having met Michael at the Nottinghamshire fair on my first visit (Michelle introduced me to him at his crystals stall) I got to know him better on subsequent visits and by arranging to interview him. Although he was initially reticent at being interviewed, believing, he admitted later, that I wished to understand what he was doing by simplifying it, by the end of the interview we seemed quite at ease in each other’s company and he invited me along to a crystal healing workshop he was due to hold. A white man in his early forties, Michael told me that he had been brought up as an Anglican and subsequently ‘retained’ his ‘interest in ‘spiritual issues’ by attending Transcendental Meditation and rebirthing classes for a number of years. From these, in his early thirties he moved on to involvement with a ‘spiritualist development circle’ and a ‘master shaman’, for whom he and Michelle had organized workshops in the East Midlands. His involvement in these latter two groups had been rather

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irregular and Michael said he never fully followed through what he learned at them. For example, although he had many ‘deep’ and ‘amazing’ experiences in what he called ‘meditation’ at these groups, including making contact with ‘spirit guides’ and discovering what was his ‘power animal’ (a horse, which he said represented resilience), he was never able ‘to channel’ a spirit. Also, during much of this time, he said he was on tranquillizers prescribed by his doctor, for he found his state of mind ‘very unsettled’. At this time, Michael was working as a sales manager for a medium-sized firm in the East Midlands, at which he said he was ‘very good’ and ‘making a lot of money’, yet he felt dissatisfied with this, finding it ‘meaningless’ because it was so ‘routine’ and ‘predictable’. So he gave in his notice and ‘lazed around for a year’, a period in which he lived off his savings but did very little, including in terms of involvement in spiritualism and shamanism. It was during this time that several religious experiences occurred that held significance for him in his later endeavours. For one whole night, from 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm, Michael felt ‘compelled’ to write ‘quatrains’ or four-line rhymes that were, he said, ‘like new age platitudes, generalizations, garbage … rubbish and meaningless’. Indeed, he said he could not even ‘think’ except in such a form. He understood neither what was forcing him to do this nor from where the poetry came, but he found himself unable to stop writing them: ‘At the time, I felt I was doing something momentous. It felt really important, as if I had to do this, although it meant nothing in terms of how it could be translated for anybody else.’ When this stopped, Michael went for a walk on a nearby common, feeling a ‘real high’. This experience did not repeat itself, but a few days later, also whilst on a walk, he began to hear voices in his head holding a ‘conversation’ about him as if he could not hear them. He described this as ‘a very disempowering experience’, until they ‘condescended’ to ‘invite’ him into their conversation. Although Michael did not want to say either what that talk was about or to show me any of the quatrains he had written, he said these were experiences of ‘great force’ and ‘consequence’ for him. Like the writing of quatrains, this experience did not occur again, but he thought about it a lot and it ‘troubled’ him. Towards the end of this year of unemployment, Michael began to help in a friend’s mail-order business in crystals, to show him how it could be done more profitably and to demonstrate to himself once more that he could be successful: ‘I did it to show what sort of a person I could be.’ When I asked him whether this was because his unemployment and depression had left him feeling unconfident, despite his previous success in the business world, Michael agreed. As part of his business, his friend held stalls at ‘spiritual fairs’ and invited Michael to attend one. Michael said he was ‘on a high’ the whole day, and that his ‘body took on the pains’ of people coming to the stall to purchase crystals, over which he had ‘no control’. This was something he had never experienced before; indeed, he said that he had never really been very interested in healing. At the fair he also had two photographs of himself taken at a stall that showed the state of his ‘aura’. Framed and placed on his living-room wall, Michael showed me how the first picture, taken at the beginning of the day, pictured a discoloured aura around his body, but the aura in the second was almost uniformly white. What this showed, he said, was that his aura had changed from ‘ill’ to ‘well’ because he had spent so long around the ‘healing powers of crystals’.

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Michael was so taken with these experiences, in addition to having a financially successful day at the fair, that in the following months he set up his own crystal selling and crystal healing business. He drew on his prior business experience but also his training at the spiritualist circle, for it was the ‘spirit guide’ that he had made contact with there that taught him how to use the powers of crystals to heal. This spirit taught him how to control the taking on of others’ pains and to develop his use of ‘intuition’ to discern where they needed healing. Michael said that it was ‘madness’ to use crystals in healing: it made no sense, but the fact was it worked. Not being sure why crystals worked, Michael said he judged them according to how they ‘felt’ to him. This feeling, he said, could not be put into words but must simply be accepted, otherwise he found he became ‘frustrated’ trying to work out why they worked. He explained that this was a hard thing to teach, for people want knowledge such as when and how to use crystals, which he could not provide; he could only try to show people how to become more intuitive themselves. His crystal healing workshop that I attended, along with six women who had not met Michael before and who mostly worked together in secretarial and administrative roles in a law firm, showed similarities with these other practices with which he had been involved. Although he did not talk about his use of a spirit guide, in private conversation with me Michael said that he often felt his guide near him when using crystals. Indeed, when he was handling crystals, Michael would speak and breathe in a different way than usual, taking longer, deeper breaths and speaking more slowly and deliberately, in a very similar way, for example, to how Shah had channelled. In this workshop, he also led a visualization that ended with several minutes of silent meditation, after which we discussed which object each of us had found in a box in an attic to which he had led us. Most of these objects were mundane ones, such as a hairbrush or an old doll, that began to take on greater significance as, guided by Michael, we saw them as objects that could ‘develop’ our sense of ourselves. Thus, Michael was legitimating and developing his use of crystals through practices and beliefs gained from his previous experiences. This ambivalent attitude towards authorities with which he had previously been in contact and to which he had reevaluated his relationship – he spoke, for example, about having a tendency to put teachers on a pedestal in the past – was therefore manifested through his current practices. This reaction against religious authorities was also reflected in Michael’s interests and beliefs, which drew from a variety of sources. For example, he had recently become interested in theories of extra-terrestrials from ‘higher planes’, which he found a ‘fascinating cosmology’, but he said he was not particularly concerned to integrate this with his other interests. The cosmologies from any of his interests could come into prominence at different times, he told me; ‘I can switch cosmologies, but can’t point to one and say, “That’s right,” although that would be a wonderful point to arrive at’. Michael’s attitude to authority Michael’s development as a crystal healer, particularly given the experiences of automatic writing and hearing voices in his head that occurred not long beforehand, must also be placed in the context of the development of his views on religious experiences and the founding of the fair. He believed that the experience of ‘psychic phenomena’ was a common way in which

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people were introduced to ‘spirituality’. Without any help from others who had been through similar experiences, he said there would be a danger of ‘emotional imbalance’, as there was for him following those experiences. He said that one of the functions of the fair was to provide a ‘framework’ in which people could understand their experiences, teaching them that these are not really what ‘spirituality’ is all about. ‘Ninety seven per cent of experiences of spirits in the head are chauvinistic higher consciousness experiences’, he told me, which he explained to mean that the vast majority of such experiences arise from people’s own selves, particularly parts of themselves that are egotistical and arrogant, rather than from people’s interaction with spirits. Michael lamented the fact that there existed no institutionalized ‘new age counselling service’ to help people through these experiences. These views related directly to his attitude to channelling. Whilst he had attended Sheila Patterson’s workshop, he found its emphasis on ascension ‘escapist and disagreeable’. Channelling, he said, provides no framework in which to put what is experienced, for it is as if someone else were trying to take over, like the voices he had heard in his head. Yet whilst channelling was unacceptable to him, his interest in spiritualism and use of a spirit guide, and his view that at least a minority of experiences of spirits in channelling were genuine, shows that spirit possession remained highly significant for him. This was also shown by his practice of Reiki, which, as I will discuss later in this chapter, has similarities to possession. Michael told me he found Reiki healing to be ‘comfortable and gentle’, explicitly contrasting it with channelling, which he said ‘feels more urgent’ and leaves the practitioner ‘less protected’. Yet the very fact that he compared these two shows the strong similarities between them for him. The point of ‘spiritual development’, according to Michael, is the ability to help others, not to gain power that may be exercised over them: ‘In terms of my own life, it’s about being a nice person, about relating to other people’. He linked these issues of development to social authority: the fair was intended, he said, to avoid the dependence that often results from more formal events, such as in spiritualist development circles. In these, others’ views of what is or should be experienced are imposed upon those new to such experiences. So those producers he allowed into the fair come recommended through friends as being ethical in that they did not force such impositions on others: ‘Intent is all important’. When a ‘spiritual teacher’ is needed, he said that a ‘humble one’ should be chosen. Often this will be a ‘spirit guide’, although whether this is the ‘higher self’ or a separate being, Michael was unable to answer, for he said he was in fact unable to distinguish between the two. Michael appeared to know all the speakers and stallholders at the fair personally, as well as about a fifth of those who attended. Coupled with the fact that I encountered many people there that I had met at other groups, this shows that networking was an essential element to the fair’s success. Michael kept a mailing list to post details of each month’s fair, also including leaflets for his own crystal business and workshops, compiled from people he had ‘picked up from different sources’. He said that initially he had maintained a lot of control over which producers to have in the fair, according to his own ideas about what people wanted, but later on he had let others take a part in that choice, which had led to a greater mix of talks, less concentrated on ‘psychic phenomena’, by which he meant spiritualism. He believed that those who attended

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were ‘called’ there by some sort of force and trusted his ‘higher self’ that whoever needed to attend, would do so. He invited ‘universal support’ for his venture and believed that only if he blocked the ‘flow’ would it fail. It may be said, then, that Michael ran the fair partly from a sense of mission: ‘I believe what I’m doing is right’, he claimed. Michael’s narration of his life history demonstrates a number of issues that have emerged in the previous two chapters. He conceived his working life as a flawed success in which his ability and achievement remained essentially dissatisfied because of limitations not of his own making. Although he appeared to be, and represented himself as, financially comfortable, his work experience and lifestyle suggested not a middle-class status but the sort of professionalized managerial working-class status already discussed. Alongside this lay his churched upbringing and shift away from that into other religious groups. Central to these in his narration, as for so many others in the network, were practices of possession – in his case, involvement with spiritualist and shamanistic groups, and channelling. Also like others, this focus on such practices was couched ambiguously in terms of their authority: Michael both valued and devalued their power. Thus, whilst he talked about the ‘self’ and related this to the ‘new age’, such discourse was highly strategic and ambiguous rather than operating as a clear worldview or lingua franca. Indeed, practices of possession remained central to his practices through his contact with supernatural ‘energies’ in crystal healing and Reiki, and in his continued courting of spiritualists’ involvement with the fair. Attention now focuses upon Reiki by considering the lives and healing practices of Sally, Noel and Beth. Reiki, healing and possession Reiki in the lives of three healers My approach raises criticisms of studies of alternative healing in Euro-America, which have tended to construct belief-systems and worldviews rather than focusing on a socially contextualized understanding of practices and authorities. Although this also applies to McGuire’s (1988) seminal study of alternative or ritual healing groups in suburban New Jersey, the empirical detail of this study leads her to recognize diversity within each category of healing. This applies especially to her category of ‘psychic and occult groups’ (1988, pp. 27–9), which includes spiritualists, crystal healing and divining and therefore relates most strongly to healing in the Nottinghamshire network. Furthermore, McGuire pays serious attention to authority in these groups, including in self-transformation (ibid., pp. 240–45). This nuanced, sociologically valuable approach can be seen as resulting, in part, from the freedom methodological and theoretical approaches have by not being constricted by the scholarly fixations upon simplified and reified notions such as ‘New Age’ and ‘movement’ that mark other studies of healing (for example, English-Lueck, 1990). The holistic imagery of the self, which for many scholars typifies New Age healing, is seen by McGuire (1988, p. 246) as central to all her categories. This imagery was recognized earlier in Beckford’s studies of new religious and healing movements,

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although his tentative links between these and ‘New Age groups’ (1984, p. 260) or ‘the New Age milieu’ (1985, p. 84) later became more firm (Hedges and Beckford, 2000, pp. 172). Nevertheless, Hedges and Beckford (2000) rightly criticize studies that present holistic healing as an individualistic activity, emphasizing instead, through an empirical study of nurses’ practice of alternative healing in the English East Midlands, the relationship with the healer and the significance of shared experiences. Three friends first encountered at the meditation group were Sally and Noel, who were siblings, and Beth. In their mid- to late-twenties, they were the only attenders around my age and we came to know each other very well, meeting not only at this group, which they had been attending for eight months, but also on a social basis to discuss the topics I was researching. This later led to participation at informal sessions they used to practise Reiki healing. The interest of Sally, Noel and Beth in various healing practices figured strongly in most of their conversations with the others at the meditation group, since Sally was self-employed as a reflexologist and Beth as a masseur, both practising at home and at local holistic health centres, and Noel was an aromatherapist. But it was their practice of Reiki about which they were particularly enthusiastic and upon which they expounded in my chats with them. Not long before starting to attend the meditation group, Sally and Noel had been initiated into the first order of Reiki at a weekend workshop in Suffolk, East England. Noel was the first to have been introduced to Reiki, during massage by a friend who had drawn upon Reiki energy. During this massage, he had a ‘vision’ of an eye, which gradually widened to display a smile and eventually a dolphin. Noel told me that dolphins and whales are from other worlds and are ‘pure love’ and that his friend had experienced the same vision during his own first Reiki session. Whilst she had not been initiated into Reiki, Beth participated with Sally and Noel in a weekly time they set aside to practise it on one another. Sally also used Reiki energy in the flower remedies she combined with her reflexology, to give them extra potency. When I reestablished contact with them at the fair in the second phase of my fieldwork, Beth and Noel had progressed to take the second initiation in Reiki and Sally was in the process of taking the third. Reiki became very popular during the 1990s, shown not only by the increasing frequency by which it figured in people’s conversations and practices in the Nottinghamshire network over my two periods of research, but also by its increasing conspicuousness at the Nottinghamshire fair and the London Mind-Body-Spirit Festivals (see Hamilton, 2000, p. 193). Leaflets on offer from various stalls at the fair explained its history, the main points of which were consistent with the origins of the practice as described by Sally. According to these, Reiki is an ancient Japanese healing practice rediscovered in the nineteenth century by a Chinese Christian missionary, who in his search for the secret of physical healing was led to a Japanese Zen monastery where he found an ancient sutra. Meditating on this, he had a vision of four healing symbols and afterwards realized he now had the ability to heal. Sally told me that the word Reiki refers to ki, the ‘life-force’ that flows through the meridians of the body, and is equivalent to the Chinese term chi, and rei, meaning ‘spiritually guided’. On being initiated into mastership of Reiki, she said in her lecture at the fair, ‘we are able to channel ki energy through us’ to wherever

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it is needed. This is usually done by the laying-on of hands, but the energy may also be stored in other substances for healing or transmitted over long distances. Reiki initiates use symbols to make the energy stronger and undergo four ceremonies used to open ‘channels’ or ‘chakras’ in themselves so that Reiki can be used, ‘for the rest of life’, and each time healers use Reiki energy, its ‘power’ must be ‘invoked’ (for an ethnographic account of one such ceremony, see Mold, 2001, pp. 313–44). The source of the three friends’ particular interest in, and excitement about, Reiki can be found in its overtly religious mode of operation. Sally and Noel distinguished it from reflexology and aromatherapy because of its ‘spiritual power’ and the ‘state’ that the healer needed to be in for it to work. Noel reported that since being initiated into Reiki he had left unfinished his training in aromatherapy, despite having spent two years of work and money on the part-time course at a local college. Compared to Reiki, he said, it just was not ‘spiritual’ or ‘potent’ enough. Whereas Sally also felt her reflexology course to be lacking in ‘spirituality’, initiation into Reiki had led her to assimilate it to this practice to provide that element, rather than to abandon it. In acting as a ‘channel for energy’, said Sally, Reiki practitioners use their ‘intuition’ to locate where to place their hands on clients’ bodies. The energy has its own ‘consciousness’ and ‘knows’ what to do to heal, which may be on the ‘physical, emotional, mental, spiritual or soul dimensions’. In receiving it, clients can exercise their psychic faculties to perceive past-lives and images, which is why clairvoyants often see the energy as a beam coming through the practitioners’ hands. In order properly to contextualize their roles as Reiki healers, I will turn to the narration of their life histories. Sally and Noel were brought up as Roman Catholics in Belfast, moving to England in their early twenties for work. Noel had come to Nottinghamshire five years before I first met them and Sally had followed soon after – they were clearly very close and had looked after each other financially and emotionally throughout their lives. As teenagers, each had taken the decision to stop attending church, although Sally said she still felt ‘guilty’ every time she entered a church, which she sometimes did in order to meditate, and neither had since been members of what Sally called ‘organized religion’. Sally, however, said she had always stayed ‘religious’. They met Beth, who was from Nottinghamshire, through mutual friends a couple of years after arriving in the county and had since become very good friends. When I first met them, Sally, unlike Noel, had an income from her various therapies. Her interest in reflexology began after attending a workshop at a local holistic health centre and she then became a qualified practitioner. She did not embark on this career with a ‘religious’ purpose in mind, she said, and nor did this feature in the training course at all, but simply ‘to help people’. Once she began practising reflexology, however, Sally said her ‘religious character’ meant she felt something was missing from it: ‘spirit’ did not feature in the course. For example, she criticized healers for modelling themselves on medical doctors in order to gain respectability. Since practising Reiki she had instead come to see that healing should operate on a quite different level. Noel confirmed this, explaining that the ‘spirit’ must be balanced before the ‘body and mind’ can be. At the Nottinghamshire fair, Sally held a regular stall and gave talks about Reiki, telling me that she had now started the course for the third level of initiation, which

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enables initiates to act as ‘masters’ able to train others, but had not abandoned her previous healing practices. Sally had become even more serious about Reiki by the time of this renewed contact with her: her stall at the fair functioned to attract clients but also to get people to join a Reiki ‘development group’ she was setting up. In one of her lectures, entitled ‘A Life Force Energy Healing’, Sally said that she planned soon to start her own Reiki workshops and linked Reiki to other religious beliefs and practices, including the Essenes (although she had ceased attending the meditation group). According to her, Reiki was learned and used by the Essenes, a ‘Gnostic sect’ as she called them, and thus it is likely that Jesus also used it. In addition, she located Reiki within wider religious contexts, claiming that it had been taught to schoolchildren in Lemuria and is mentioned in ancient Buddhist texts. Like Noel, Sally enjoyed attending the fair not only because it provided the opportunity publicly to strengthen her role as a healer, but also because it was a way to learn about other practices, particularly by getting to know other producers over time. Sally was becoming interested in astrology and often talked to a book stallholder and a medium who were knowledgeable on the topic. This indicates once more that the eclecticism commonly noted in such contexts (see Wood, 2000, p. 83) should not be interpreted as resulting from a self-authoritative ‘pick-and-mix’ or ‘bricolage’ approach, as in Bowman’s (1999, pp. 184–5) understanding of the healing marketplace, since it involves complex involvement with many authorities. This similarly renders Rose’s (2000) definition of New Age healing as involving the authority of the ‘Higher Self’ too simplistic and misleading. In contrast, a socially contextualized understanding such as I have pursued here shows eclecticism and its consequent individualization to result rather from the proliferation of authorities, since such proliferation makes it unlikely that individuals will become involved with the same authorities. Unlike Sally, when I first met Noel he was in the middle of what he described as a ‘tough’ training course in aromatherapy. In previous years, whilst being either unemployed or in temporary casual employment, he had become interested in a wide variety of groups and writings: Subud, the writings of White Eagle, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, and the Quakers. These seemed to have little in common for Noel, who described himself as simply ‘flitting’ from one group to another and ‘picking up’ on what interested him within each. These interests, however, had not led to any regular attendance at groups, except for the meditation group, which he attended with Sally and Beth. This range of religious interests did not, however, mean that his beliefs or practices were confused or transitory, for he interpreted his ‘searching’ in terms of the ‘changes’ that were taking place in the world and his role in relation to that. In distinction to Sally and Beth, Noel focused on his role in life, attributing to himself a degree of importance, in terms of ‘spreading the new age’. He spoke of the ‘great pull’ he felt towards California, where he believed the ‘catastrophic changes’ leading to the ‘new age’ will manifest themselves most sharply. Noel expressed difficulties coping with life which is why, he said, he often needs to camp in the countryside by himself at weekends. This sense of having a ‘role’ to ‘fulfil’ only really developed, Noel said, after he had been introduced to Reiki, which showed him that ‘God is love’ who acts

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as the ‘highest power’ by which to deal with ‘earthly matters’. Noel’s practice of Reiki had brought out the ‘spiritual’ side to his life that he had felt to be missing by concentrating his energies on aromatherapy and on those religious traditions, such as White Eagle, which taught one to approach God through a mediator. Reiki, he said, involves trust in God directly and therefore also love and security, which can ‘open psychic powers’, as was the case with the ‘Reiki master’ who ‘initiated’ him and Sally. This ‘master’, Noel told me, channelled John the Baptist and unlike much other contemporary channelled material, Noel could tell it was ‘good stuff, from the heart’. Noel used Reiki in his practice of flower essences, on which he lectured at the Nottinghamshire fair. ‘My job in this lifetime’, he told his audience, putting his hand on his heart, ‘is to raise people’s consciousness.’ He told us that he increased the power of the flower essences by imbibing them with Reiki energy. This was needed, he said, because of the great changes that were occurring in the world today. ‘In the modern West’, he said, ‘we’re getting nowhere fast’: society is ‘repressing’ people by its ‘norms’, leading to a situation in which they are not ‘taking charge of their own lives’ and feel ‘unimportant and unworthwhile’. ‘Stress’ was the key term Noel used to describe this condition; many of his clients, he told me, came to him depressed and he saw his healing role as enabling them to consider whether they are doing what they really want to do in their lives. He explained that through the use of flower essences and Reiki, he is able to act as a ‘counsellor’ in order to ‘empower people so that others do not tell them how to live’. Despite this ‘regressive’ direction the world was taking, as shown by wars and poverty, he also noted the rise of ‘spirituality’, of ‘new age philosophies, spiritual beliefs’. Noel’s perception of his role in the world had been heightened and focused by using Reiki. When I knew him at the meditation group, he described himself as a ‘lightworker’ and ‘an active person for the new age’, although he had attended neither of the channelling workshops organized by the Spencers, at which this term was used. At the Nottinghamshire fair, he told me that he used ‘Reiki energy’ in his healing therapies because it is an active power in the world, being the ‘Earth energy’, the first of five ‘rays’ of energy in the universe. Indeed, it was through the use of Reiki that Noel said he had ‘realized about life’ and his need to spend time alone ‘to work life out for myself, to balance’. Like Sally, he had found in Reiki a practice that he could use to provide a religious focus to his life and healing practices, legitimizing these on the basis of a personal connection to religious powers. Beth’s religious biography was rather different to Sally’s or Noel’s, since she had become a non-community-living member of ISKCON when 17 years old. After several years, she eventually rejected this group because of the ‘guilt’ the group’s leaders made her feel about not being more committed, but, more importantly she said, because of the lack of silent meditation: ISKCON meditation involves the chanting of mantras, whether alone or in a group. This was one reason Beth liked the meditation group, although she told me there that she ‘switches off to meditate silently’ during its visualization part, which she found too detailed and long. Sally and Noel agreed with this assessment and all three of them gradually ceased attending this group. In contrast with Noel, Beth felt ‘more calm and settled than ever before’; she had three children from a previous relationship, aged between four and 11 years old, and the house that she owned was well furnished and spacious.

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As well as earning through her healing practices, she worked as a secretary for a small local company. Beth expressed optimism concerning current society: ‘People are more open for ideas now, because of the 1960s. That didn’t fizzle out, but has become the contemporary situation.’ Reiki and possession This discussion demonstrates once more the ambiguous relationship to religious authorities of those in the network. Sally, Noel and Beth had histories of religious experience punctuated by involvement with authorities that, though significant for them, did not involve them in disciplinary regimes that formatively shaped a set of dispositions or sense of self. Although the practice of Reiki and the role of being a Reiki healer were highly important for these three, it is important to note that this did not refer to a formative experience. Let me stress once more that I am not implying that formative experiences are marked by a lack of contestation and of multiplicity of authorities. On the contrary, disciplinary regimes and their associated ritualizations always involve such contestation and multiplicity. But what distinguishes relatively less formative contexts is how, on the one hand, these contestations and multiplicities are strong enough to prevent the formative shaping of experience and, on the other hand, extant authorities do not attempt such shaping. Thus, despite the importance attributed to the practice of Reiki and the role of being a Reiki healer, other practices and roles continued to be of importance in their lives and narrations. The process of being initiated into different levels of Reiki competence was temporary and lacked sustained or intensive involvement with Reiki masters, even if these were held in high regard. Rather, the ability to practise Reiki healing led, for Sally and Beth, to renewed interest in their other healing practices and, for Noel, to renewed interest in channelling and ideas about the ‘new age’. Their regular Reiki healing sessions, as I will show, were marked by wide-ranging discourses that often were not related to Reiki energy or practice. Instead, Reiki, like the Essene content at the meditation group, provided a rather weak context for other practices and beliefs, rather than a framework that shaped their practice and belief. The three friends recognized that through its empowering and relaxing properties, their channelling of Reiki energy provided an opportunity for them to think and converse about many other religious and moral matters. Although it would be easy, in line with Bourdieuian and Foucauldian approaches, to assume that the importance to them of Reiki practice and the role of being a Reiki healer meant that they had been subjectified along the lines of this practice, my contextualized study shows this not to be the case. Like channellers, for whom the practice of channelling and the role of being a channeller are very important, these practices and roles existed alongside others through their biographical and contemporary involvement with multiple religious authorities. Although the practice of Reiki, like channelling, led to certain subjectifications and dispositions, these were not of a formative nature such as to lead to a relatively clear sense of self or set of dispositions. This perspective can be reinforced by a consideration of the Reiki healing sessions that the three friends held weekly and which I frequently attended. These were informal evenings and although Noel or Sally would always ‘invoke’ Reiki energy

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in order to ‘channel’ it, as they said, they were opportunities for them and Beth to ‘try out’ many other healing therapies – sometimes their usual ones and sometimes new ones in which they had become interested, such as crystals. On a few occasions, Sally and Beth employed the use of astrological charts to help them determine how the therapies should be used on us. Whilst they described these evenings as ‘Reiki sessions’ and Reiki always featured in them, they were far from being centred upon Reiki practice or discourse. Noel, being the most active in learning about religion, would often talk about what he had read, and it was noticeable to me that there was little attempt to relate Reiki energy or practice to these discussions. Whilst I was the only one to have no initiation into Reiki practice, this elicited neither comment nor consternation. Reiki healing appeared, then, to be a reason for holding these sessions, without shaping their practice or discourse at them. It must be asked why, given this nonformative context, Reiki became so popular and could assume significance in people’s lives. As with channelling, the answer is to be found in the connection with the supernatural that it provides, in other words its explicitly religious aspect. Like channelling, but unlike such practices as meditation or aromatherapy, the learning and practice of Reiki takes place in a religious mode because at its core is the fostering of communion with supernatural entities. Noel’s first experience of Reiki was similar to experiences of involuntary spirit possession found in channelling. A dolphin, a being which, it transpired as I got to know him, represented religious power for Noel, appeared to him, leading to feelings of being shocked and overwhelmed. Like channelling, then, Reiki acts to establish and maintain competence with other religious practices and with a religious sense of self. These similarities are reflected in understandings of Reiki and channelling as the transmittance of religious powers through a mediating body, where those powers maintain a life or agency of their own. In talking with Reiki healers such as these three friends and Michael, it was clear that there was a distinction between Reiki and other healing therapies in terms of how it was taught and practised. Relating to a supernatural energy, Reiki was believed to have extraordinary efficaciousness. According to Sally, it is a positive energy that disperses negative energies on any number of dimensions – the energy knows what to do and its long-lasting effect means that once in operation it can start to change those life contexts which led to the build-up of negative energy or imbalances in the first place. The distinguishing element of Reiki, however, is that it was believed to derive its efficacy from energies lying beyond the natural world of people’s bodies or their earthly environments, reflected in comments that other therapies were not ‘spiritual’ enough in comparison to Reiki. Indeed, this may have been reinforced by the secular institutionalization of many therapies, in which nationally recognized training courses have been established allowing their monitoring and regulation along lines comparable to allopathic medicine (Mold, 2001, pp. 19–20), as opposed to the initiation into Reiki healing by a master involving the use of secret symbols. This religious distinction between Reiki and other healing therapies gave it a similar legitimating role that I have shown for channelling. As the discussion of these three healers shows, it was often used to confer a religious efficacy to therapies otherwise thought to be insufficiently religious. Noel used it with flower essences and Sally with that and reflexology. So although Reiki bears many similarities to

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other therapies, and may properly be described as one, it differs from them through its purely religious efficacy. Reiki energy needs no physical mediation, therefore differing in its operation from plant therapies (such as aromatherapy and flower essences), massage therapies (such as reflexology), and bodywork therapies (such as shiatsu). However, similar features were present in some people’s practice of crystal healing, as I have shown for Michael’s view of their power and agency, and the involuntary possession experiences he associated with the period when he first came into contact with crystals. Similarly, a crystal healer who regularly gave talks and held a stall at the fair had adopted an ancient Egyptian name given to him during channelling and explained that crystals are ‘channelling energy’. He also told us how through using crystals he had developed use of the healing energy from his palms, saying it was what other people call ‘chi,’ ‘Reiki’, ‘prana’ or ‘spiritual healer’. Likewise, another person I spoke to at the fair who practised crystal healing employed language redolent of possession, explaining that ‘The crystal chooses you, you don’t choose the crystal’ and describing herself as an ‘instrument’ of crystals. In this chapter, I have explored themes emerging from the previous two ethnographic chapters in the context of a religious fair and the lives of some of its participants, including the centrality of possession and the nature of authority. Spiritualism figured at the fair and in many people’s lives in the network, as also did other religious traditions such as Theosophy and paganism. In order properly to understand the Nottinghamshire network and its nonformative nature, it is important to contextualize it in terms of these traditions that lay on its periphery. The next chapter discusses my fieldwork with groups relating to these, exploring their greater degree of formativeness but also the presence within them of individuals who can more properly be situated in the social space of the Nottinghamshire network.

Chapter Seven

Spiritualism and paganism In this last ethnographic chapter I turn to religious traditions that lay on the social edges of the Nottinghamshire network: spiritualism and paganism. By discussing my fieldwork at a spiritualist healing circle and an occult study group, without seeing these as strictly representative of each tradition respectively, I explore similarities and dissimilarities with my other fieldwork sites. There was social movement between all these sites, as well as with others within these three traditions such as an Anthroposophical group and a magick group (both briefly described here), and spiritualist churches, the Theosophical Society, a group focused on Gurdjieff, and an astrology group. There are also overlaps between each of these traditions themselves; indeed, they can be seen as elements within Euro-American religious revivals from the late nineteenth century. Each part of this chapter first deals with more general points about the history, organization and authority of each tradition, before turning to my fieldwork. Discussion about their formative tendencies distinguishes them from my other research sites and it is this issue that is taken up in a more theoretical and explanatory manner in the concluding chapter. The spiritualist healing circle Spiritualism in historical and social context Spiritualism has featured throughout my previous chapters, with many people shown to have trained with mediums, attended spiritualist churches or becoming influenced by groups such as White Eagle Lodge. Spreading from the Eastern United States in the nineteenth century in a context of broad religious revival associated with trance, ecstasy and possession experiences (Taves, 1999), spiritualist practices of communication with the deceased developed into a bewildering variety of organizational forms: churches, cults, circles and entertainment. Although spiritualism declined after the First World War, it remained a lively and important religious element in British popular culture (Hazelgrove, 2000). In a rare sociological study of spiritualism, Nelson (1969, pp. x–xi) draws out its ambiguous reactions and connections to wider Euro-American society in terms of what he sees as its democratic belief that anyone can communicate with the spirits of the deceased. Tracing the effect of this through the early years of spiritualism in Britain, Nelson (ibid., pp. 91, 96–7, 111–12, 165–7) describes the trouble that regional and national associations experienced in establishing themselves, only managing this when mediums came under increasing attack from various sectors of society such as the judiciary’s invoking of the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Even with the establishment

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of spiritualist churches, authority tended to become decentralized and dispersed, reflected in the circuit system of visiting mediums that was adopted from Methodism and Congregationalism: ‘Spiritualism is based on the freedom and spontaneity of mediumship and many people feared the effect of formal organisation on this spontaneity’ (Nelson, 1968, p. 474). Although there arose, at times, prominent national figures, such as Emma Hardinge-Britten who helped establish the Spiritualists’ National Union (SNU) in 1890, no figures stood for the whole tradition, not least because of the split between Christian and non-Christian spiritualists (Nelson, 1969, pp. 105, 241). Rather, authority played its greatest role at the local level, although it was often inhibited by being viewed as fraudulent, by the crediting of religious power to a medium’s spirit guides rather than to mediums themselves, and by more than one medium sometimes claiming to receive messages from the same spirit (ibid., pp. 242–5). Although these features hindered the formation of strong forms of social organization, Nelson draws out a number of points that demonstrate significant coherences within the tradition, concluding that ‘Spiritualism then is a cultic movement containing within it centralized cults and a large number of independent local cults’ (ibid., p. 234). Healing formed a part of spiritualism from its earliest days and continues to be practised at church services and in circles (ibid., p. 200). This aspect in part became formalized through the establishment of federal organizations to certify, aid and protect healers. The largest of these, the National Federation of Spiritualist Healers (NFSH), delegates authority to regional associations; publishes a monthly magazine; provides insurance, legal and advisory services; refers patients; organizes lectures and demonstrations; and negotiates with National Health Service hospitals for the admittance of its healers (ibid., pp. 200–201). Spiritualist healing Twice a week, Alvin Simmonds held a spiritualist healing circle with his wife, Irene, and their friend, Edward. I have already described how I became acquainted with Alvin at the religious fair, where he held a stall and lectured. I was keen to investigate a spiritualist involved with the Nottinghamshire network because of the prominent role of the religion in the lives of many of those I had met. Alvin and the others were very happy for me to attend their meetings, which they allowed me to observe and which provided considerable opportunity for talking with them. This did not seem to disconcert their clients, who all declined Alvin’s enquiry whether they preferred me not to be present. Indeed, many of the clients were enthusiastic in talking with me about their health troubles and their experiences of spiritualist healing. I continued this fieldwork for six months, during which time I also attended the fair. The healing circle took place in the Simmonds’s home, a bungalow in one of Nottingham’s less affluent suburban areas. The client was seated on a stool around which the three healers would position themselves on an easy chair, another stool, the arm of a chair, or by kneeling on the floor. The healing would last between 20 and 40 minutes, after which there would be between 10 and 15 minutes’ chat whilst Irene made a hot drink for the client – the chat would be very informal, particularly as the healers were usually tired by their exertions, and touched not only on how the

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healing had felt to the client and how he or she now felt, but also on how they had been keeping and how their lives were going. It seemed like an informal auditing session designed to gauge whether the healing was making any difference to their lives, and thus how long they should continue to attend. Within an hour of arriving the client would have left, leaving the healers to relax and gather their strength before the next arrived. There were three ways in which people heard about Alvin’s work: through word of mouth from clients or other healers, through advertisements at fairs and spiritualist churches, and through his other religious practices such as the Tarot and clairvoyance (for which he charged fees, unlike these healing sessions). Each session comprised three or four smaller periods in which the healing was stopped and started, with each healer changing their hand actions. This ‘laying-on of hands’, as Alvin called it, took three forms: a sweeping massage from the top of the client’s head down the sides, to the neck, shoulders and back, which he called ‘polishing the aura’; placement of both hands on a local part of the body, such as the cheeks, back of the head, or a thigh; and placement of the hands further apart, covering a wider area of the body, such as both knees, an arm, or the back. When all three healers had finished, they stood or sat back, appearing exhausted and flopping into comfy chairs, as the client took a minute to open her or his eyes, stretch, and feel different body parts such as the neck and back. The majority of clients expressed satisfaction with the healing, claiming an improvement in symptoms and describing to me the different feel of the ‘energy’ from each healer. Healing was seen not as a quick remedy but as an ongoing treatment. Whilst some clients only required a few sessions, others received several months of weekly or fortnightly attendance and frequently returned for more sets of sessions as new health problems arose, as well as referring relatives and friends to Alvin. This spiritualist healing did not presuppose the clients’ participation in spiritualist churches or further involvement with mediums, nor any overt acknowledgement of the role of the healers’ spirit guides. It did, however, involve recognition of the authority of the healers – particularly Alvin, as the teacher of the other two, as I will explain – and many comments were made by clients to the healers and to me about the ‘power’ and ‘energy’ of Alvin. The contrasting feature to other healing practices that I had researched in the network was neither the exercise of authority by the healer, nor the fact that many clients believed their own power to be the crucial factor in healing (with this power enabled by that of the spirits and energies). Rather, it was the way in which this authority structured clients’ experiences and their understanding of themselves. Over successive sessions, the majority increasingly talked about these in the same terms as did Alvin, not only employing the same terminology but, more importantly, viewing this healing as crucial for any effective treatment of their problems. Unlike in the meditation group, for example, authority in this circle provided a framework and not just a context for experiences and understanding. Moreover, again in contrast to the multiple authorities with which the meditators were involved, this framework was strengthened by clients’ experiences of other mediums and spiritualist organizations (such as churches and other circles) because these multiple authorities tended to act in unison as regards such experiences and understanding. Thus, there was not the relativization of authority that I found elsewhere in the network, where the recognition of a healer’s authority or efficacy

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did not structure experiences and understandings in a formative manner but were inhibited by doing so as a result of involvement with other divergent authorities. Attitudes to authority It is useful to discuss Alvin’s life history, since this is rather different from those that have been presented in previous chapters in that it shows a religious career within a specific tradition. In his forties and employed as a hospital porter, Alvin was brought up as an Anglican but said he did not interest himself in religion until his twenties, when his first wife and father died within six months of each other. This, he said, led to him asking ‘the two fundamental questions’, of whether there was a God and whether there was an afterlife. To answer these, Alvin decided to attend his local spiritualist church, there finding out for the first time that his paternal grandmother and father had both been practising mediums and certified healers. Comments by a medium at one service convinced him that his dead father’s ‘spirit’ was ‘alive’ and led him to train in a spiritualist circle for three years, under a medium whom he regarded as good because he ‘let spirit teach’. After that time, which included many ‘wonderful experiences’, Alvin found that his attitude to life had changed and he began a small ‘home circle’ at his mother’s home (where he was living), as well as establishing a reputation for lecturing and for mediumistic abilities on the ‘spiritualist church circuit’. Alongside this, Alvin trained as a counsellor, doing voluntary work with the charities Samaritans, Scope and Leukaemia Research, including as a social therapist at local hospitals. Alvin told me that a turning-point in his work as a medium came when one of his ‘spirit guides’ led him to a book on mediums at a local spiritualist church library, after he had received a name by automatic writing. This name turned out to be that of a medium who had established a spiritualist circle or ‘bureau’ at the end of the nineteenth century before dying in tragic circumstances. Alvin ‘instinctively’ knew that he was to re-establish this bureau as a home circle to develop mediumistic, psychic and healing powers such as table-tapping and table-lifting, use of the Tarot and astrology, and homeopathy and meditation. His leaflets for this group described it as an ‘alternative natural health and spiritual awareness centre’. Its meetings were held in a hired hall with as many as a dozen members, but it was temporarily disbanded as too many people had left or died. Coupled with this loss of activity was Alvin’s discontinued involvement on the spiritualist circuit once he married Irene five years before my research, but he continued to attend religious fairs. In spiritualist healing and clairvoyance, Alvin claimed access to eight spirit guides, all of whom once lived on earth, but at different times and in different societies. The spirit guide he had worked with for longest was a woman named Lee,1 who Alvin said appeared to him nearly twenty years previous to my fieldwork and with whom he had formed an ‘intimate relationship’ such as is rare, he said, between any people. From the information she had given him about her life, Alvin managed to trace her origins to Vietnam, discovering that she lived and died there earlier in the twentieth century. Lee came to him often, he said, comforting him when he feels troubled and she has promised to be with him until the end of his life. Alvin said he could often see her near him even in everyday situations, and during clairvoyance

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she stood behind him to tell him about his clients. It was another spirit, however, who directed his healing work, a man who had practised as a medical doctor whilst alive and whose existence Alvin had again verified by checking birth and medical records. But the most important spirit he worked with was White Cloud, who had been a Native American chieftain and who now acted as his ‘doorkeeper’, allowing access to Alvin only to those spirits who did not have malicious intent. Alvin said he had spoken to White Cloud only five times, to be told things of great importance (the details of which he did not wish to discuss with me, saying that they had been for his ‘ears only’), although he always sees him when he is in contact with other spirits. The sort of possession that Alvin experienced was not, he said, ‘trancemediumship’, by which he meant cases where spirits take over the bodies and minds of mediums to speak and act through them – although he had experienced that once in his life. Rather, the spirits spoke to him, giving him information about people’s lives and illnesses, or directing him how to interpret Tarot cards, and gently manipulated his hands during healing sessions, the better to transmit the energy that flowed through him. At the time of research, Alvin may be described as having reached a mature stage in his spirit possession career, whereby he had mastered both his contacts with spirits and his social context of possession (in the sense of managing a healing circle, holding stalls and delivering lectures), as well as training those new to possession. It was through him that Irene and Edward, who originally came to him for healing for cardiovascular problems and alcoholism, began to develop their own abilities. In fact, Edward still received healing from him and Irene, usually being the first client of one of the twice-weekly sessions. Although he had attended spiritualist churches and healing circles for a number of years, Edward’s mediumistic abilities only developed, he told me, when he came to Alvin for healing several months before my research. He had now acquired a medical doctor as a ‘spirit guide’ and begun to practise aromatherapy, reflexology and homeopathy in conjunction with his healing as a medium. As for Irene, Alvin was acting as her trainer to be a certified healer with the Healer Practitioner Association (HPA), for which she was required to spend nine months training with a certified healer. Alvin’s social position was also indicated by his authoritative statements that came not from spirits but from his own reflection on social issues, such as about a ‘new science’ that will take account of ‘psychic issues’, as expressed to Irene, Edward and myself, as well as to some clients and in his lectures at the fair. Unlike channelling, then, spiritualist healing may be seen as formative for four reasons. Firstly, it is usual to train for a relatively long period with an established healer. Secondly, this training usually takes place in a context where others are being trained, such that the trainee forms part of a group. Thirdly, there are several marked stages to this training, such as becoming used to being contacted by spirits, acquiring a spirit guide or doorkeeper, and, eventually, taking on clients by oneself. Fourthly, standardized forms of recognition exist for mature, established healers, such as certified membership of the HPA or NFSH. This relatively strong authority structure in spiritualist groups, notwithstanding participants’ ambiguous attitudes to authority, is shown in Locke’s (1983), Skultans’s (1974) and Zaretsky’s (1977) ethnographic studies. This is also shown by the greater degree of personal rivalry amongst the spiritualists in the network in comparison to other authorities. Alvin

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and Irene frequently made critical comments about other mediums and their lack of real powers or inflated egos. Alvin, for example, talked negatively on a number of occasions about Matthew Manning and Doris Stokes. Another instance of rivalry occurred at the Derbyshire religious fair which I attended with Alvin. In the late morning, after I had helped him set up his stall and then gone to investigate on my own what the fair had to offer, Alvin complained to me and to the woman who held the stall next to his, about his lack of clients. He attributed this in part to his position at the back of the hall but mostly to another medium who had a stall nearby and who was doing better business than he. This woman had, he explained, placed a spell on the other mediums’ stalls that surrounded them with negative energy and thus drove away potential clients. He had been able to feel this energy and to counter it he said he had performed a spell of his own. When I asked Alvin in the afternoon if his spell had worked, he told me that it had and, with a grin on his face, pointed out the lack of clients at the woman’s stall. As such, becoming a spiritualist healer or medium clearly involves different forms of authority and social organization than those groups considered in previous chapters. Yet in some ways, this spiritualist circle and its members, as well as other spiritualists I met whilst researching the network, bore similarities to people in those groups, enabling it to exist on the periphery of the nonformative regions of the religious field. There existed a relatively strong criticism of spiritualist organizations, and a tendency to develop abilities in other practices and to hold views drawn from outside the remit of these organizations. Alvin was outspokenly critical of spiritualism and those involved with it, saying in fact that he did not describe himself as a ‘spiritualist’, for there is too much ‘politics’ involved within it, although he occasionally attended those spiritualist churches in the region which he described as ‘nice’. He was also critical of the ‘spiritualist circuit’, claiming that today’s ‘spiritual readings’ (that is, pronouncements by mediums during seances) concentrate on the audiences’ ‘feelings’, rather than, as in the past, providing ‘facts’ about their lives, such as street names of where people used to live. This meant, he said, that people are not given the evidence that will convince them their dead loved ones are alive, which was important in prompting his involvement with the movement. Likewise, Irene expressed dissatisfaction with spiritualist groups, explaining that she would not join a spiritualist development circle because she disliked the jealousies that arose in them, but regularly attended the United Reform Church for its preferable ‘atmosphere’. Like Michael, Alvin and Edward held criticisms of such circles for allowing human teachers to take precedence over spirit guides. Alvin and Edward practised other forms of therapy and all three actively participated in religious fairs in the region, expressing considerable interest about the other practices and groups they encountered in these. A note on the Anthroposophical group Arising from spiritualism, the Theosophical Society and its subsequent splinter groups such as the Anthroposophical Society (founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1912) marked a more erudite and middle-class development from the late nineteenth century. Unfortunately space does not allow any detailed discussion of the

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Anthroposophical group I researched at the start of my fieldwork; instead, I have concentrated on spiritualism, because this was important in the life histories of so many in the network, and paganism, because the relationship between the New Age and paganism has received significant scholarly attention. Nevertheless, some brief ethnographic remarks on this group can be made to indicate its relatively formative nature. The group’s fortnightly meetings involved a series of short readings, followed by discussion, of texts by Steiner, with one of his chosen books being worked through meeting by meeting, this being Steiner’s (1986 [1906]) At the Gates of Spiritual Science during my attendance. These discussions were managed by Tom and Maria, the two leaders of the group, who in a subtle but firm manner brought them back continually to Anthroposophical issues and terminology. One example of this concerned a woman new to the group who purported a view openly critical of Steiner’s comments in a passage we had just read (namely, Steiner, 1986, pp. 114–16). In this passage, Steiner (ibid., p. 115) distinguishes between ‘three different ways of development’: the ‘Eastern way’ or ‘Yoga’, in which an initiate follows a ‘Guru’ and whose ‘absolute surrender of one’s own self suits the Indian character; but there is no place for it in European culture’; the ‘Christian way’ in which ‘there is one great Guru, Christ Jesus Himself’; and the ‘Rosicrucian way’ in which the ‘Guru’ acts not as a leader but as an adviser, providing directions for ‘inner training’. This woman objected strongly to such a view of yoga, explaining how it had benefited herself and other ‘westerners’ she knew. Maria took the lead in defending Steiner’s views by arguing that other ‘cultures’ could not be comprehended because they are at a different ‘evolutionary stage’ to the ‘West’. Thus, she explained, ‘Eastern practices’ should not be sought for ‘spiritual development’. When the new attender continued to disagree and to argue that it was ‘silly’ not to make use of practices that had proven so ‘spiritually beneficial’, Tom interjected slowly and quietly to reiterate Steiner’s position at some length, drawing attention to a passage in the previous chapter (ibid., pp. 99–102) that had been read in the last meeting that this woman had not attended. There, he reminded us, Steiner argued that Indians are ‘the first sub-race of the Aryan race’ and as such are to be distinguished from ‘the fifth sub-race, to which we [Steiner and his assumed audience] ourselves belong’ of the ‘Germans and Anglo-Saxons’. Then, drawing our attention to the next chapter we would cover (ibid., pp. 117–28), Tom explained how ‘these evolutionary differences’ apply to all areas of our lives, such as economics and bodily posture. Tom’s interjection terminated this discussion of yoga, for he then asked Maria to begin our study of this chapter by reading the first few pages; the woman who had defended yoga was given no opportunity to reply. It is important to note, however, that she did not attend again. With between 12 and 16 participants in the group, six of these had regularly attended for at least two years and focused their discussions on Anthroposophy and Steiner. My conversations with them showed a strong Anthroposophical identification, despite some being involved with other religious practices such as channelling workshops or religious fairs. Clearly, they did not engage with these other authorities to the extent that they upset the formativeness of Anthroposophical authority. However, as in the example provided, the other attenders were much more likely and willing to divert discussions to other issues and to refer to other authorities, leading to contestations with the core Anthroposophists. Their failure to achieve this

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in any enduring manner left them frustrated with the group (expressed publicly and privately) and usually meant that they did not attend for very long. One of these was Anne, the retired civil servant who introduced me to other groups and expressed strong criticism at how the group was run. The relatively formative nature of this group may therefore be compared to the spiritualist and pagan groups I researched, but contrasted to those discussed in previous chapters. The occult study group Pagan formations The history and development of modern paganism is even more complex than that of spiritualism and Theosophy, in part because of the greater strength of local geographical and historical strands. These include witchcraft, druidry, shamanism, magic and occultism, although none unambiguously identifies a set of social phenomena and each covers a wide range of histories and developments. Despite this, there have been sufficient points of contact between these strands, and sufficient formation of common identities, for ‘paganism’ to stand as a useful and accurate description. Here, I will discuss paganism’s formative tendencies before turning to my fieldwork with an occult study group on the fringes of the Nottinghamshire network. Hutton’s (1999) history of ‘modern pagan witchcraft’ traces in detail the invention of this religion in Britain from the early nineteenth century, as a number of largely erudite and wealthy people drew eclectically on writings and practices from folk traditions and post-Enlightenment occultism, magic and secret societies. There is evidence of the formation of isolated covens with limited authorities of priestesses and priests, but in the middle decades of the twentieth century there developed two specific strands of witchcraft (or Wicca): Gardnerian in the 1940s and Alexandrian in the 1960s. These established more persistent and identifiable traditions and social organizations that spread popularly, due to the publications of their founders Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders, and to media interest. This occurred both nationally and internationally such that in Euro-America today there is widespread popular interest in witchcraft (Ezzy, 2003), as well as a thriving coven scene. Within witchcraft, which as Greenwood (2000) and Luhrmann (1989) show substantially intersects with magic and occultism, there are different emphases. There has also emerged a strong feminist current, which in San Francisco and partly due to the authority of one witch, Starhawk, took a staunchly social activist direction (Hutton, 1999, pp. 340–68). Significantly, Hutton (ibid., p. 413) concludes that ‘pagan witchcraft … is more than a shared set of stories, language, or images, and more than a common store of deities or texts. It has a common identity and a common institutional structure.’ Witchcraft has spread by initiates deciding to set up their own covens, often by splitting from existing ones and taking a number of members with them (Luhrmann, 1989, p. 38), as well as by claiming authority on the basis of the lineage of their training. Covens are small groups, mostly with numbers in single digits, usually led by a woman (the priestess), often in conjunction with a male priest. These

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exercise authority within the group by directing and taking leading roles in rituals, by the training of uninitiated members, and by the management of relations within the group, members of which are not supposed to belong to more than one coven (Hutton, 1999, p. 389). Yet there is considerable contestation of this authority, such as by those initiated members who wish to claim more weight in the running of the coven, and because many members maintain an active interest and participation in a range of pagan practices and groups (Greenwood, 2000, pp. 138–43; Luhrmann, 1989, pp. 27, 33–5; Magliocco, 2004, pp. 11–12; Simes 1995b, p. 187). A significant formative factor within witchcraft is the practice of structurally prescribed rituals at certain times of the year, especially the cross-quarter days of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain, but also the equinoxes and solstices. These involve drawing circles as a protective boundary, calling on elements to connect with nature, symbolic enactment of couplings and sacrifices (particularly by the priestess and priest), and the invocation of deities (particularly the goddess) in order to communicate with, or enter the bodies of, the ritual participants (for descriptions of rituals, see Greenwood, 2000, pp. 84–102). These prescriptions allow for a large degree of improvisation in terms of spoken texts, the structure of the action, objects used, roles adopted, and so on (Luhrmann, 1989, p. 70). Even within the same coven, rituals are likely to differ from one year to the next and are often the cause of conflicts. Covens also practise less formal rituals at their regular meetings, as well as teaching systems of magic (such as the Tarot, the Kabbalah and astrology) and meditation or visualization. Magliocco (2004, p. 147) argues that pagans largely agree about what rituals should feel or look like; indeed, it is because there is such a basis that contestations over group rituals make sense, because there is something common to contest. Furthermore, the strength of this commonality is reflected in the strength of contestations, since pagans believe that what they are contesting has social value. The persistence of rivalry within paganism, often taking public forms, is again confirmed by Magliocco (ibid., p. 116) who notes incidences in which pagans felt others in their ‘community’ had attacked them, particularly those with whom they had had disagreements although the ‘accused always denied the allegations’, and by Hutton (1999, p. 408) who claims that ‘British Pagan networks are … riddled with rivalry and gossip’. Thus, despite the presence of endemic power struggles that frequently dissolve or weaken groups, there are strong and enduring identifications that establish differences with outsiders. ‘Pagan’ has emerged as one of the most important of these, in part fostered through the institutionalization of common identities such as through national conferences and associations (Greenwood, 2000, p. 6; Hutton, 1999, pp. 371–3; on national organizations, events, sanctuaries and temples in the United States, including in response to perceived threats and misrepresentations, see Hartman, 1976, p. 175; Kelly, 1992, pp. 142–5). The Pagan Federation, based in the United Kingdom, has an institutionalized authority structure and membership, and one of its key roles is in endorsing pagan prison chaplains, which, as Beckford and Gilliat (1998) show, is a key area in which religious organizations attempt to define themselves. These formative tendencies are shown not only by the strength of networking across groups but, crucially, also by the emergence of study groups and discussion forums, which assume common interests and identities (Greenwood,

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2000, pp. 3–4; Harvey, 2000, pp. 165–6). Within the English network of pagan groups she studied, Simes (1995a, pp. 331–2) describes the negative reaction to the idea of creating a national central pagan meetinghouse. But what is noteworthy is that such a project was discussed in the first place and that it was rejected on the basis of being too permanent and costly, and involving too many problems of ownership, which suggests common recognition of a pagan identity (however ambiguous) that could be represented nationally. Magliocco (2004, pp. 57–60, 70–71, 84–91) explores this sense of common identity within the pagan scene in California by focusing upon the concern of her field subjects with who is or is not part of their community or movement (most commonly identified as ‘pagan’). This has led to what she refers to as an ethnicization of paganism and the emergence of jokes that address issues of boundaries (as well as differences amongst pagans).2 Magliocco (ibid., pp. 62–4) also draws attention to the formation of identity through consumption and the resultant presentation of selves and homes, which clearly can be related to a sense of taste by which social groups mark themselves off from each other. Simes (1995a, pp. 102–3, 149, 393) similarly likens paganism to an ethnic identity, because it is formed through boundary-making and not just because those from different traditions share a commitment to ritualizing or to a common vision. Furthermore, ethnographies show that an important element of pagan boundary-making is the drawing of distinctions with what they perceive the New Age to be (Lindquist, 1997, pp. 289–90; Magliocco, 2004, pp. 84–7), a project that scholarly accounts of the New Age and paganism have replicated through their methodological adoption of folk models for sociological explanation (see Greenwood, 2000, pp. 8–11; Prince and Riches, 2000, pp. 250–63; York, 1995). Nottinghamshire paganism The meetings of the occult study group Each meeting of an occult study group in Nottinghamshire, which I attended in the four winter months of 1993–94, was devoted to exploring in detail a topic, by a talk and discussion lasting approximately two hours, and to socializing, lasting at least a further two hours. About a dozen people attended, eight of whom were regular attenders, with roughly equal numbers of men and women, but the average age of about thirty was at least ten years younger than those other groups with which fieldwork was conducted. The meetings rotated between the houses of three of those who presented talks: Martin, Susan and Mary. During the whole of 1993, the founder of the group, Martin, led 16 of the 25 meetings, with the others shared by a further seven speakers. Martin had founded the group by getting some friends together, by posting notices in an alternative bookshop at the end of 1992, and by advertising in what he described as ‘a local pagan magazine’. This latter was done, he said, specifically to ‘link up with pagans’ in the area. He attempted to run the group with some formality, organizing a newsletter at the winter solstice of 1993 and a trip to Arbor Low stone circle in the nearby Peak national park earlier that summer. The meetings were held every other Friday evening, like the meditation group, but lasting beyond 11.00 pm. The topics covered in the group provide an insight into its treatment of religious issues, being dominated by ancient traditions: creation myths, Nostradamus, Theosophy, Egyptian

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pyramids, stone circles, Celts and Toltecs all featured throughout 1993–1994. In both personal conversations and public speech, participants showed an interest in the history of religion and frequently included psychological and sociological views on religious matters. This was particularly espoused by, although not confined to, those who utilized such perspectives in their work and educational studies: Martin was taking part-time Access (A-level equivalent) courses in psychology and sociology with a view to entering university; his partner (Marion) and Suzi (the partner of another attender, Peter) were taking postgraduate courses in social work; and an older couple, Leon and Clare, were social workers. The meetings began informally with people arriving from 6.45 pm and sometimes after the talk had begun, which was never at a set time but simply when some of the key participants (those who tended to give talks and in whose houses the meetings were held) decided that it should start, which was usually between 7.30 and 8.00 pm. Although the majority of participants knew each other, it was not uncommon to have a (sometimes intimate) conversation with someone without knowing their name, reinforcing the sense of informality at the group. The talks themselves would last between 40 and 60 minutes, and be given in a variety of styles. During his talks, Martin sat cross-legged on the floor and spoke quite softly, often turning to books and props; Leon’s were much more formal and authoritative; and Susan’s were more practical, such as involving a visualization or an exercise with a partner, so that we could experience what she was talking about. The talks generally provided a significant amount of information on the chosen topic (some people would make notes), often starting from a historical overview before moving on to a consideration of the relevance of the particular tradition to society today and to our personal lives. Participants engaged in a lively manner with the material with which they were presented, which broadened out into a general animated discussion after the talk ended. During the talk, there would usually be some interruptions by the audience, asking the speaker for further information or clarification. This occasionally, and especially during the discussions, became argumentative when speakers presented their own opinions. These arguments were frequently sharp and heated, drawing in other people and leading at times to rude, even personal, remarks. Unlike at the Anthroposophical meetings, however, such confrontations did not lead to the subjugation of one speaker by the other, for no overriding authority existed (such as group leaders or a body of work such as represented by Steiner’s) from which resolution could be sought. Rather, different opinions were expressed without any of them being retracted, humiliated or silenced. Nor did there seem to be any bad feelings afterwards, in fact, such disagreements usually led to longer discussions during the socializing period, which others would join. At times, however, Martin would intervene to suggest that whilst differences existed, it was time for the discussion or talk to move on, ‘or else’, he would say, ‘we’ll be here all night’. The discussion would usually move away from the evening’s topic, so that presenters were not necessarily central to what happened after their talks. Most people would contribute at some point, although those who spoke most were the key figures already mentioned and three or four others. The direction of these discussions was unpredictable, but they would generally orientate around pagan traditions and traditions of astrology, the Tarot and the Kabbalah. Correspondences

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between different traditions and religious histories would be raised and discussed, and religious traditions from different cultures and historical periods were commonly linked to those already listed, to suggest a common thread in humanity’s religious variety. After about an hour Martin would suggest that someone should put the kettle on and the discussion would break up. Small groups would generally then carry on their discussions, there would be invitations to other groups and events, and the lending of books and materials. Participants at the occult study group The ethos of these meetings can be explored by turning to some of the key figures in the group and from this a broader sense of the pagan scene in Nottinghamshire can be established, in which the study group was clearly situated, thus largely separating it from the Nottinghamshire network. Like all other participants, Martin was white and British. In his early thirties, he had never had stable employment and generally found work in casual manual labour. Martin had attended a Baptist church some years previously, to explore, he said, ‘the depth of the world’ that he had experienced through drugs, but after a couple of years had left that church and started to become interested in the occult through the influence of some friends. This provided him with a more satisfactory insight into ‘what’s real’, as he put it, and this interest had since become increasingly important to him. As already noted, he and Marion were mature students. His studies were reflected in his talks at the group, for example he had given one on Abraham Maslow whilst preparing an essay on humanistic psychology. Whilst Martin explicitly located his interests within paganism, they specifically lay with occult traditions. His interest in these may be described as a concern with systems: principally, the Tarot, the Kabbalah and astrology. Particularly influential upon him was Aleister Crowley, as shown by a picture he had drawn of the Kabbalah Tree of Life, which he told me had influenced Crowley, and his ownership of a reproduction set of Crowley’s Egyptian Tarot cards. Crowley was a significant figure in the formation of modern British paganism who developed ‘a system of occult practice’ that he likened to science rather than religion, which he called ‘magick’, and who influenced Gardner, who claimed to have been initiated into Crowley’s British occult group the Ordo Templi Orientis (Hutton, 1999, pp. 171–80, 206). Crowley, in fact, was a dominant figure in the occult study group, not only because of his general importance on the development of British paganism, but more specifically because it was his system that formed the focus of a Kabbalah group which Leon ran and which several of the study group attenders, including Martin, frequented. Martin’s house contained several metres of bookshelves on occult topics, to which he would refer frequently in order to clarify issues. The study group provided Martin the opportunity to develop his thoughts on occult subjects, prompting him to research and formulate them further, but also provided the opportunity for him to learn more about them through the discussions and the topics presented by others, since several attenders were, he said, ‘experts’, such as Susan on astrology and Leon on the Kabbalah. His interest in astrology led to the view that significant changes were occurring in society as a result of the shift to what Martin called a ‘new astrological cycle’. He described this as an emerging ‘new age’ and in one discussion explained that there existed a ‘new age movement’ because of the general interest in the ‘sorts

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of things’ looked at by the study group. No one disagreed with Martin’s opinion, but the term ‘new age’ was rarely used at the group, except to articulate the idea of a shift in cycles as found in astrology and the belief-systems of other cultures such as the Toltecs. I never heard the term ‘new age movement’ mentioned again in the group, although there were frequent references to a sense of greater numbers of people interested in similar topics, often referred to as ‘pagans’ or ‘occultists’, or sometimes more specifically as ‘astrologers’ or ‘Wiccans’. Many participants at the occult study group also attended two other study groups in the local area: Leon’s Kabbalah study group and an astrology study group. Respectively, these had around half a dozen and a dozen or more regular participants. The latter had arisen from one of the occult study group’s meetings and was led by two sisters, Susan and Mary, who were regular attenders. Although I did not study these groups ethnographically, discussions about them with those who did attend were illuminating. Whilst both were concerned with the interest in religious systems shown by Martin, Leon practised this in a group that studied Crowley’s exposition of the Kabbalah more formally and in depth, with himself acting as the teacher within the group. According to Susan, however, she was involved in running the astrology study group in order to open up further vistas of religious concern, notably what she called ‘the psychology of personal development’. Susan had heard about the occult study group through a friend from Friends of the Earth, the environmental group in which she was active. It turned out that at least two other of the group’s attenders were also members of this organization. A 34-year-old mental health worker, she had begun attending with Mary, her sister, and particularly valued the ‘open’ atmosphere at the group. She and Mary had been practitioners of astrology for many years, and viewed the occult study group as a way of discussing their interest in this with other practitioners and of learning about related religious systems. She was, however, wary when talk at the study group became what she described as ‘too academic’; in her two talks that I attended she was more interested in getting us to do something practical so that we could ‘feel’ for ourselves. It was especially the forthright voicing of book-based opinions that annoyed her, and she would often argue with Leon at the meetings, since his attitude, as will be shown, was considerably more didactic. It was as a result of the considerable interest shown in her talk on astrology that Susan had decided to set up an astrology study group with Mary, which was frequented by several of the occult study group attenders, including Martin, although not Peter, Leon or Clare (who were more involved in the groups focused on Crowley that Leon ran). In researching the occult study group, then, I entered a network of pagan groups (indeed, a local pagan scene) that existed across Nottinghamshire and its adjacent counties of Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, and that was concurrently being researched by Amy Simes (1995a). It was not uncommon for Simes and me to know the same people within this scene through our separate studies. This scene was far more coherent in terms of identity (specifically through people’s descriptions of themselves as ‘pagan’ despite their interest in a variety of different traditions) and social organization, as I have already discussed and as Simes’s ethnography demonstrates, in comparison with the fieldwork sites examined in previous chapters. This can be reinforced by discussing the attitudes of Peter and Leon, and their magick group.

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Peter, Leon and the magick group Like his good friend Martin, and roughly the same age, Peter was employed in casual manual labour, and his partner was on the same vocational course as Martin’s partner. A regular at the occult study group, Peter was also an initiated member of a witchcraft coven. Privately, he was rather derogatory towards the occult study group, in whose discussions he would not participate very much. He criticized some participants by saying that they did not investigate occult matters with sufficient seriousness and commitment. ‘They do not really want to get to grips with the things they look at’, he told me, giving Anne as a particular example, a point that will be discussed further on. Leon’s Kabbalah and magick groups, he said, provided a context for the ‘serious study’ of the ‘occult’, especially through Crowley’s writings. The magick group had three levels of initiation (or ‘Orders’), which according to Leon were taken from the rituals of freemasonry that had influenced Crowley, the third being to take on a role of responsibility within the group: Peter was the ‘publicity officer’. In addition, it issued ‘degrees’ to its members relating to competence in various aspects of magick, such as the Kabbalah and the Tarot. The group was a year old, which, Peter said, was ‘good for a magickal3 association’, because many collapsed within a few months. As part of his role, he had arranged for the group to be listed in a directory of pagan and occult groups. Whilst showing me the entry, Peter commented upon other listed groups, making a number of derogatory remarks about some of them.4 Certainly from this side of his pagan activities, Peter’s main interest was in the writings and life of Crowley, from whose books he would read to me to explain points about the Tarot, Kabbalah or magick. Although his practice of the Tarot and Kabbalah was guided by Crowley’s work, at one point Peter took pains to explain that he was not ‘all concerned’ with Crowley but it was simply that Crowley ‘just said things best’. For this reason, he said, he became concerned when people misinterpreted Crowley, either those who were against him (such as Christians) or ignorant ‘pagans’. Peter’s reaction to me is enlightening to consider, because it expressed a different attitude than I experienced from my research discussed in previous chapters, although there were similarities to the way in which Alvin and the leaders of the Anthroposophical group treated me.5 In the first place, he was wary of my status as a social researcher and wanted to ‘grill me’, as he put it, about my research and personal views, particularly in order to make sure that I was not a ‘fundamentalist Christian’ trying to ‘expose’ the magick group. As part of this, he tested my reaction to a condom (thankfully still in its packet) that he casually tossed over to me when I first visited his house. The fact that I picked it up seemed to allay his fears, even though, whilst thanking him for his kind gift, I told him I preferred to purchase my own. Whilst it would be too strong to claim that Peter tried to convert me to Crowley, he was very keen that I should become seriously involved in the group in order to study it, which he urged me to do. ‘Now you are getting to the real meat’, he said of my studies, adding unflattering remarks about the other groups that I had researched. This would require, he said, making the magick group the focus of my research, since I could only understand it as an ‘insider’, which demanded ‘great commitment’. I should, he said, ‘pick his brains’ on these religious matters. There was clearly a publicity orientation to his urging, since he asked me to name

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and thank the magick group in my doctoral thesis, which he also offered to help me publish because he knew someone in the publishing industry.6 In his mid to late forties, Leon was held in high regard in the occult study group. He had been interested in ‘the occult’ (Leon used this term rather than describing himself as a ‘pagan’) for a long time, following a period in early adulthood in which he had been a Seventh Day Adventist. Leon was the most practised speaker at this group, establishing himself as an expert on many of the issues with which it dealt, expressed by the steady flow of his speech which, along with its authoritative and clear manner, made it difficult for people to interrupt him. Also unlike others in the group, the points he made were less soft-spoken, with a sharper intonation that emphasized them. Leon attended the occult study group with his partner Clare, who spoke much less than he and usually directed her remarks to him, providing Leon the opportunity further to expound his own views. It is important to note the differences of these two from the majority of the other attenders: both were social workers and thus enjoyed a higher income and social status. Unlike Peter, Leon was not wary of my presence and specifically invited me to meetings of his magick group – even if I was a ‘fundamentalist Christian’, he said, when I was talking to him once about Peter’s suspicions, ‘any publicity is good publicity’. This group – and, from others’ descriptions of it, the Kabbalah study group – allowed him the opportunity to exercise authority, by acting as the most prominent speaker and by directing discussions. Indeed, these were basically teaching groups; as Martin put it (he himself was a fairly regular attender), it was another group for ‘teaching and swapping knowledge’. At the few meetings I attended, there were never more than eight people present. Martin was there twice and a couple of other regulars at the occult study group, other than Peter and Clare, also attended once or twice. In addition to Leon, Clare and Peter, there were two other regular attenders, one a female bank manager in her fifties and the other a slightly younger man. This group’s meetings were marked by Leon’s speech – ‘he doesn’t give full stops’, joked Clare in front of him at one meeting, which elicited a laugh from Leon. Our attention was continually brought back to Crowley’s life, theories and writings. As in his talk at the occult study group, there was much referencing of books, particularly those by Crowley. The group’s meetings, however, did not include specific ritual practices, except for a short period of meditation on one of Crowley’s themes or symbols. More often the meetings, which usually lasted about three hours, would become a discussion based around Leon’s knowledge of Crowley’s systems (including the Tarot and the Kabbalah), extending into an interpretation of current affairs and participants’ lives. It is useful to investigate authority at the occult study group through considering reactions to Anne. It was Anne who had mentioned my research to Martin, leading to him telephoning to invite me to his group. Anne had begun to attend the group after ceasing to attend the Anthroposophical meetings and was of a different agegroup and social background to most of the others, reflected in her more outspoken and confident manner. Whilst interested in the various speakers’ topics, she would openly adapt their ideas to shed light on her religious concerns. In one meeting she interrupted Martin, who had just made reference to one esoteric tradition that had begun four hundred years ago, to tell us about a catastrophic flood that had

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also occurred at that time, remarking that it was going to happen again soon, as prophesied by David Icke. This rather unusual deviation from pagan traditions was treated in a similar way in which views deviant from Steiner’s theories were often treated at the Anthroposophical meetings in that no one responded to her and Martin then resumed his talk, although her view was not contested in the way it might have been in those meetings. Icke had recently figured as the subject of one of Martin’s talks, although the general tenor of that meeting (which Anne had also attended) was that Icke had little basis for his theories and many in the group had mocked them. Martin had become intrigued by Icke after seeing him speak in a local lecture, but told us that he was not impressed by him, for although Icke claimed to be saying something new, in fact he was not. Aside from this, some of his beliefs, such as in aliens, Martin considered not ‘proven’ and as ‘not particularly religious anyway’. In contrast to others at the group, however, Peter was irritated by Anne’s presence and warned me to take what she said ‘with a pinch of salt’. He cited her as an example of why the study group had ‘turned out’ as it had, rather than becoming a group that could deal ‘properly’ with religious issues, which he had hoped it would when it first began, such as the other groups he attended. For example, Peter ridiculed as ‘pathetic’ and ‘ludicrous’ Anne’s belief in ‘grays’, the term given by Icke to aliens who negatively influence people on Earth, as espoused in his numerous books and in his frequent lecture tours (including to Nottingham) in the 1990s, which Peter did not think warranted serious consideration in an occult study group. As with his other negative views on the group, Peter’s remarks were voiced in private – vociferous public denunciations were generally confined in the occult study group to situations in which opinions were felt to have been expressed too authoritatively, as with Susan’s disagreements with Leon. Conclusion This ethnographic account of spiritualist, Anthroposophical and pagan groups shows significant differences from the meditation group, the channelling workshops and the religious fair. I have drawn attention to the much greater presence in the former of social identity, social boundaries, rivalry, gossip and authoritative leadership, and of the focus upon key figures, texts and systems of belief and practice. To emphasize these differences, it is useful to compare the Nottinghamshire network with those traditions on its social periphery in terms of six criteria that Mitchell (1973, pp. 31– 2) uses to classify a ‘corporate group’: ‘membership recognized by both members and non-members’, ‘Common aims and interests of the members’, ‘Norms and rules commonly accepted by the members’, ‘Capability of joint action by the members’, ‘A division of labour between members in terms of their common aims and interests’, and ‘The persistence of relationships of positions beyond the incumbency of individual occupants of those positions’. Whilst Wilson (1975, p. 13) rightly points out that our conception of religious movements should allow for informal organization, arguing that ‘classification of religious movements by the extent to which they are institutionalized is a clearly inadequate procedure for movements that have arisen outside the boundaries of established Christianity’, unless some criteria are established the very meaning of ‘movement’ or ‘organization’ becomes

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incoherent, as I have argued occurs in New Age studies. By interpreting the notion of membership loosely, Mitchell’s criteria can be useful for indicating the manner in which people’s experiences and subjectifications are shaped in a relatively more formative (though, of course, not uncontested or replicating) manner. My ethnography shows that each criterion is weak or very weak in the network, but moderately to very strong in the peripheral traditions (although this is questionable for the last criterion). Spiritualist, Theosophical and pagan traditions, movements and groups demonstrate this formativeness, reproduced in the particular groups I researched. In these, leadership was exercised differently than in the Nottinghamshire network, with those who had in-depth knowledge being recognized as experts, often leading to the establishment of study or training groups centred on their leadership and the establishment of a describable religious career. This greater establishment of authority was also reflected in the significant degree of gossip, rivalry and denouncements at these groups, as individuals or factions competed with each other for religious capital. The resulting subjectification in terms of a particular religious habitus amongst participants was shown in their speech and attitudes, particularly as these were expressed in idioms of social identities and traditions, and bodies of knowledge and experts. These groups remained at the social periphery of the Nottinghamshire network because these formative tendencies facilitated only a limited degree of overlap, such as Anne’s presence at the Anthroposophical and occult study groups or Susan’s attendance at the religious fair. I now explore these differences more theoretically in the concluding chapter, engaging once more with scholarly literature on the New Age. My discussion then moves beyond this to compare practices of possession in the Nottinghamshire network with other religious traditions, in terms of wider social changes of a neoliberal nature. Notes 1 As with field subjects, the names I use for these spirits are pseudonymous but attempt to reflect the spirit of their names, as it were. 2 One very formal kabbalistic group, for example, was referred to as ‘High Episcopagan’ (Magliocco, 2004, p. 146). 3 I later confirmed this spelling with Peter. 4 For example, Peter described the leader of one occult group as a ‘wanker’. 5 This was also similar to the relations I had with some Methodists in my later postdoctoral research. 6 I hope it is superfluous to explain that the present book is not such an outcome.

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Chapter Eight

Nonformativeness, possession and class in neoliberal societies This book has proceeded in two parts. In Chapters One to Three, I engaged with the field of sociological studies concerning the New Age, documenting it in terms of its key theme that the New Age is a social movement in which self-authority triumphs over external authority. I showed how in recent years this theme of self-authority has proliferated in wider studies of Euro-American religion and examined its methodological and theoretical flaws. Methodologically, this theme has been promoted on the basis of very weak empirical evidence. Many studies have focused primarily on published literature, but those that pursue other methods generally do so in a manner that fails adequately to situate their findings in social context: interviews, for example, tend to focus on beliefs rather than practices, and ethnography tends to be episodic and only focused on rituals. Theoretically, this theme operates with an unacknowledged and unquestioned distinction between self-authority and external authorities, with little awareness of the manner or means by which self-authority may arise. In part, this has developed by scholars drawing upon certain current social theories, such as detraditionalization or postmodernization, in a relatively uncritical fashion, simply locking these on to empirical results without seriously allowing one to interrogate the other. Adopting a stance that emphasizes issues of power, practice and social contextualization, and drawing from Bourdieuian and Foucauldian approaches, I suggested ways in which authority can be more adequately investigated and understood. Chapters Four to Seven pursued this perspective by engaging with my ethnographic study of a network of religious groups in Nottinghamshire, England. Long-term fieldwork at a meditation group and religious fair was coupled with attendance at various other events, including channelling workshops, and shorterterm fieldwork at a spiritualist healing circle, an Anthroposophical group and an occult study group. I was particularly concerned with investigating the issue of authority in groups and in individuals’ lives, demonstrating in the meditation group, religious fair and channelling workshops the existence of a strong ambiguity towards authority involving not only the contestation and construction that can be found (to a greater or lesser degree) in any social context, but also the presence of multiple authorities whose effect upon each other led to none exerting strong authority. This meant that standard Bourdieuian (in terms of describing a field in which agents with differing sets of dispositions or habitus compete for capital) or Foucauldian (in terms of describing disciplinary regimes and subjectification) approaches were of little interpretive relevance. Rather, I pointed to the way in which multiple relativized authorities led to the lack of competition, habitus, discipline or subjectification. This was not the case, however, in the spiritualist, Anthroposophical or pagan groups,

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each of which represented facets of a wider religious tradition and therefore existed on the social periphery of the network. My aim in this final chapter is twofold. Firstly, I will develop in greater detail the concept of nonformativeness that I raised in Chapter One to understand the nature of authority in the Nottinghamshire network, and relate this to the issue of secularization. Secondly, I will turn to issues of possession and class in the network. Throughout my ethnographic chapters, I showed the centrality of practices of spirit possession and the ambiguous class position of participants. Drawing from anthropological accounts, I will link possession to status ambiguity, and explore the growth in the latter as EuroAmerican societies have neoliberalized. Referring to the proliferation of authority, and to related processes of marketization and individualization, I will argue that an understanding of neoliberalization enables an explanation of this central practice. This is reinforced by drawing comparatively upon ethnographies that show the resurgence of practices of possession in other neoliberalizing societies, although in these cases linked to more formative religious traditions such as Pentecostalism and indigenous shamanism. In my conclusion, I call for the sociological study of phenomena such as the Nottinghamshire network in particular, and of religion in general, to take issues of power more seriously and thus reconnect with sociological disciplines. Nonformativeness The formative–nonformative tension Towards the end of Chapter Three, I considered in some detail how criticisms of Bourdieuian and Foucauldian approaches to power, coupled with criticisms of New Age studies, point towards a new conceptualization of certain religious phenomena, which I coin the concept ‘nonformative’ to understand. My ethnography of the Nottinghamshire network in Chapters Four to Seven examined in detail the peculiar characteristics of such phenomena, in terms of the authority of leadership, the attitudes of participants, life histories, and religious careers. This concept can now be given more rigorous theoretical treatment. As stated in Chapter One, I do not use the concept as a descriptor to replace that of ‘New Age’, as if the current scholarly deficiencies in interpreting these phenomena can be overcome simply by a change of name. What I have shown in preceding chapters is that interpretation can only proceed meaningfully by taking account of the relativization of authority in these phenomena, with the result that the latter do not constitute an identifiable religious (or spiritual) field, or part of such a field, with a describable capital and habitus. Whilst participants’ religious experiences and senses of self are shaped through their interaction with authorities in these phenomena, these authorities are unable (singularly or in groups) to shape these in a formative manner. Although some authorities appeared to be strong, such as the Lovells’s leadership through Essene teachings at the meditation group or channellers’ leadership in their workshops, closer ethnographic attention revealed this not to be the case, even for leaders themselves. In these events and in participants’ wider experiences and biographies, a proliferation of religious authorities existed, none of

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which exerted sufficient authority to act in a formative manner. Although there were many instances in which individuals or groups were committed to, or absorbed by, specific authorities – such as Christine’s experience of channelling or Sally’s, Noel’s and Beth’s experiences of Reiki – these were still crosscut by a variety of other authorities. This does not mean, however, that such people were buffeted around by authorities in a manner suggesting the triumph of structure over agency, or that such practice was undisciplined and morally suspect (as in Wuthnow, 1998), but that these multiple authorities were enfolded into their religious senses of self, though not in such a way as to formatively subjectify. Nonformative contexts, then, are not distinguished from formative ones by the triumph of subjectivity or structure, but by the presence of relativizing multiple authorities. This situation of nonformativeness did not exist, however, in an isolated manner, abstracted from the rest of society. The majority of people I met in the network had been brought up as Christian churchgoers and saw their present activities as biographically related to this early religious practice. Religious symbols and practices, as well as intersections with religious traditions such as spiritualism, were strongly implicated in their current practices and groups. In other words, these phenomena existed within the religious field, even if they were not involved in its conflicts. This is a highly ambiguous situation that is not anticipated in Bourdieu’s theory of fields or Foucault’s theory of subjectification. It means that the religious field contained regions in which, peculiarly, authority did not formatively shape, in Bourdieuian terms, a feel for the game of the field – groups and individuals were not inculcated into valuing or competing for the field’s religious capital, namely, as I explained in Chapter Three, relationships with supernatural entities. This does not mean either that religious capital had become loosened from traditional authorities and democratized, or that people were uninvolved with practices associated with that capital, but that there was little or no competition over it. The last ethnographic chapter showed that relatively more formative religious traditions, involving competition for the capital of the religious field, partially intersected with the Nottinghamshire network, whose participants overlapped with spiritualist, Theosophical and pagan groups. The nature of authority to act in a formative or nonformative manner is therefore relative, such that across the religious field there existed a formative–nonformative tension. In describing authority in the network as nonformative, then, I mean that it was relatively much less formative than in other groups or contexts. As I showed in Chapter Two, sociological studies of religion in contemporary Euro-American societies stress that a majority of religious people now adopt a relativizing attitude to their religious beliefs and practices by eclectically blending them with other religious traditions, as for example in the small groups focused upon by Besecke, Roof and Wuthnow. This may suggest that the concept of nonformativeness should be applied widely across the religious field and perhaps adds little to the debate, but I argue that a conceptualization of a formative–nonformative tension across the field enables a different understanding based upon the nature of social authority rather than the rise of self-authority and shows the distinctiveness of the sorts of social phenomena found in the Nottinghamshire network. This can be explored through three related features of this tension: structures of legitimation, management of experiences, and careers of participation.

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Within formative religious contexts, there exist structures of legitimation that, whilst they may be undergoing considerable change, continue to provide common standards and orientations for practice, belief, dialogue and contestation. In such contexts in Euro-American societies in recent decades, even if there have developed trends towards greater contestation of certain authorities (especially professional leadership), formative authorities continue to legitimate new authorities, beliefs and practices. These legitimators may be drawn from a wider social base than in the past, especially as a result of the expansion of the mass media and transport, but they tend to reinforce each other by drawing upon an identifiable range of justifications for legitimation, such as a group’s traditions, sacred texts and ethos. Although each of these may undergo reinterpretation, they remain as standards to which new elements are related. Even if people pursue private or small group practices, participation in the formal and regular meetings of the wider body of believers remains their touchstone. Thus, whilst there may be a growing dialogue between people of different faiths across the religious field, social identities remain relatively strong and such dialogue is a means to interrogate and thus revive one’s faith, as shown by Roof’s (1999, pp. 171–2) notion of retraditionalization. This enables the management of experiences in formative contexts, especially concerning relationships with supernatural entities. Although such relationships define the religious field, they are generally normalized or institutionalized such that they may appear marginal. How they are managed is therefore a key aspect for understanding the religious field, although one too frequently neglected in sociological literature, especially since it overlooks practice. Consequently, in formative contexts there exist identifiable careers of participation that allow those involved to be classified, assessed and treated in appropriate ways. These careers relate to group boundaries, even if these are loose and contested, and thus to careers of conversion and membership. But they also (and concomitantly) relate to careers of religious experience, whereby experience is managed in a certain direction, usually involving identifiable stages and statuses. These aspects represent significant differences from nonformative contexts, where there is a relative lack of structures of legitimation, management of experiences and careers of participation. As this discussion suggests, this does not simply arise from the proliferation of authority, for multiple authorities may still be legitimated and thus structurally related, and may still reinforce each other in management of experiences and the shaping of careers of participation. Rather, it is the relativization of authority that distinguishes nonformative contexts from formative ones, for this disrupts structures, management and careers. Thus, people in nonformative contexts still become involved with social authorities, but because they remain involved with other authorities that do not act, practically or discursively, in unison with these, such authorities are unable to act as a formative force in their lives. These considerations suggest that simply to replace an understanding of certain phenomena as New Age with that of popular religion, as suggested by Sutcliffe (2003a, pp. 19–20), misses the crucial point that what distinguishes these phenomena is their nonformative nature of social authority. Popular religion can be understood in terms of existing in unorthodox areas of the religious field and thus as embroiled in conflicts over capital, shown especially in practices of possession, as for example in the (often millennial) cults and movements examined comparatively by Cohn (1970),

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Hill (1991 [1972]), Lanternari (1963), Wilson (1975) and Worsley (1970). As these studies clearly demonstrate for a variety of historical and geographic contexts, popular religions are as marked by structures of legitimation, management of experiences and careers of participation as are orthodox religions. Tensions in the religious field have also been explored by Gellner (1969) in his pendulum swing theory of Islam between monotheism and polytheism, and by O’Dea (1961) in his study of dilemmas in the institutionalization of religion. Gellner (1969, p. 130) shows the sorts of social authority and organization associated with each pole, with polytheism marked by ‘profusion of ritual and mystical practices’ and thus by the formative nature of popular religion. O’Dea’s (1961, p. 38) study is a Weberian analysis of the routinization of charisma, of ‘transforming the religious experience to render it continuously available to the mass of men and to provide for it a stable and institutionalized context’. Each is therefore addressing tensions within formative regions of the religious field, rather than the tension between formative and nonformative religious authority with which I am concerned. Similarly, the religious traditions peripheral to the Nottinghamshire network may be seen as forms of popular religion, although since the distinction between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy is contestable and changeable it must be used with care. Nonformative regions also are not to be automatically equated with audience or client cults distinguishable by ‘no discernable’ or only ‘rudimentary’ organization, since these features overlook the formativeness of authorities involved in these, even if they do ‘compete obliquely with organized religion rather than directly’ (Bainbridge, 2004, pp. 381–2; my emphasis). Similarly, an equation of such regions with mysticism, as marked by unstable social contexts and individualization (Daiber, 2002, pp. 339–40), not only ignores the formative religious traditions within which mysticism is grounded, as shown by Troeltsch’s study of Protestantism, but also, by following Troeltsch’s theology-based analysis, replicates his emphasis on internal subjectivity. This discussion shows that the relationship between formative and nonformative regions of the religious field is highly complex. My research investigates only one part of this relationship, namely a network in which formative authorities were relatively absent. On the basis of my ethnographic study, it is impossible to state accurately the prevalence of nonformative networks, but given the existence of religious fairs throughout Britain and the indications of nonformativeness in those contextualized studies that have been carried out, the meditation group, workshops and religious fair I studied are not untypical. Also, it may be that nonformative contexts intersect with formative ones in some religious organizations such as mainstream Christian churches, with a consequent multiplication and relativization of authorities, at least for certain sectors of participants. For reasons already described, I do not believe this has been shown to be the case in Euro-American societies by sociologists of religion, although no doubt individuals involved in nonformative regions occasionally do spend periods in such groups, as was the case, for example, in Michelle’s life (on which I have omitted discussion in previous chapters, for lack of room; see also Corrywright, 2003, p. 175). It may also be the case that groups focused on practices I have discussed in the ethnographic chapters have arisen with a formative nature. This may be true for channelling in the Church Universal and Triumphant (York, 1995, pp. 47–8) and in certain congregations discussed by Brown (1997, pp. 132–6).

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Without further contextualized study this is impossible to decide, so it is to theory and method that takes account of power that the sociological study of religion must turn if it is to understand religion in the contemporary world rather than simply articulating unsubstantiated models and explanations. Identities and secularization The ambiguity of authority in nonformative regions of the religious field is matched by ambiguous identities. Although Bourdieu has been criticized for not paying explicit attention to social identity (Jenkins, 2002, p. 92), a sense of identity (and consequent sense of self) may be seen as part of a person’s habitus. As I have shown, in the Nottinghamshire network the only identifiable religious identities were found in the peripheral traditions of spiritualism, Theosophy and paganism. The sense of New Age identity, however loose or ambiguous, was absent – in stark contrast to what would be expected on the basis of scholarly accounts of the New Age, which typically make free use of the term ‘New Ager’. In common with Sutcliffe’s (2003a, pp. 6–7) ethnographic study, I found very little consistent use of the term ‘New Age’ in the network. As Sutcliffe (ibid., pp. 18–19) explains, quantitative studies such as by Donahue (1993) and Rose (1998) have failed to establish identifiable factors, such as attitudes, beliefs or socio-demographic characteristics, which distinguish supposed New Agers. Others, such as by Bainbridge (2004), Höllinger (2004), and Mears and Ellison (2000), attempt to define New Agers in a circular fashion, by predefining New Age behaviour or belief and then assuming that all those who fall into this catchment area constitute a social movement or group. When understood in terms of community (Delanty, 2003, pp. 124, 145–7), New Age is also highly problematic because of the presence of other identities, labels and social scenes, such as paganism for travellers. As argued in Chapter Two, whilst the conception of the New Age as a movement has been convincingly discredited (although this still has not been recognized by the majority of scholars), the more significant sociological feature in scholarly accounts, namely the primacy of self-authority, especially as expressed through the concept of spirituality, has not been questioned. Like the term ‘New Age’, the occasional use of the term ‘spiritual’ in the Nottinghamshire network was highly ambiguous. Many people used the term interchangeably with the terms ‘religion’ or ‘religious’, as shown in the speech of Sally in Chapter Six. This lack of establishment of any distinction with other identities or groups in the religious field indicates once more the lack of participation in conflicts in the religious field. The shift from religion to spirituality described by Roof (1999), Wuthnow (1998), and Heelas and Woodhead (2005) is further questioned by quantitative studies, such as by Marler and Hadaway (2002) and Zinnbauer et al. (1997), which show the significant overlap in respondents’ uses of these terms. It might be thought that given the prevalence of the term ‘New Age’ in EuroAmerican culture, not least in the mass media, people involved with the activities commonly referred to in such discourses would naturally adopt a view of themselves and their consociates as New Agers and, moreover, come to believe that they formed a social movement. This understanding is akin to Hacking’s (1986, p. 222)

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Foucauldian-related view on how people are made through ‘dynamic nominalism’. Hacking describes how the process of counting, classifying and labelling people ‘creates new categories of people’ and ‘new ways for people to be. People spontaneously come to fit their categories’ (ibid., p. 223). However, Hacking (ibid., pp. 222, 236) also recognizes that he ‘reflect[s] too little on the ordinary dynamics of human interaction’ (a criticism that, as seen in Chapter Three, applies to related governmentality approaches) and that because there are never ‘two identical stories of two different instances of making up people’ dynamic nominalism is not a general theory. Thus, just because it is plausible that the widespread use of the term ‘New Age’ has helped to construct New Age identities, this is not necessarily the case. In fact, for those in the Nottinghamshire network, the prevalence of the term seemed to be the very reason it was not taken up, since they were wary of becoming embroiled in the formative authority it represented. Where the term has been adopted is overwhelmingly by those producers involved with the mass media, showing, as I have already suggested, that it is a primarily a marketing term. That scholars should have misconstrued a marketing term for a more widespread social identity and movement tells us much about the methods they employ. These considerations also apply to another purported identity, which leads on to consideration of a more plausible understanding of how and why people behave in nonformative regions of the religious field. Related to the supposed shift to spirituality is the view that these people are seekers exercising personal choice in a marketplace. Dumit’s (2001, p. 63-64) insightful study of what he calls ‘“New Age” groups’ in Houston describes how participants played with social and religious boundaries, including the ‘New Age’ label that outsiders applied to them, generally describing themselves as ‘seekers’. In his view, a seeker ‘narrates his or her self as “on the way”’ and may or may not be concerned with the New Age: even seekers who play with the New Age are not defined by a belief-system but by a ‘certain logic of practice’ (ibid., p. 64). A seeker is therefore marked by the exercise of self-authority: ‘it is up to the seeker to pick and choose, combine and synthesize his or her own journey. Seeking is a mode of shopping for the right combination of psychospiritual goods to make yourself up, take in what you need, and move on’ (ibid., p. 69). Yet this very mention of shopping should raise questions about Dumit’s interpretation and prompt analysis into the interplay of authorities in the lives of those he researched, for acts of shopping take place within a context of advertisements, of opportunities offered by the structured presence (or absence) of places to shop, of information, recommendations and denunciations provided by family and friends, and, not least, of the requisite ownership of capital. In other words, shopping is anything but seeking as the exercise of the self, although it may involve technologies and discourses of the self. Curiously, Dumit’s (ibid., p. 71) analysis of classes on the channelled book Keys of Enoch at a ‘New Age center’, considers how the participants, or ‘seekers’, ‘continually judge and advise teachers’, but not how they are affected by the authority of these teachers. As the model of a consumer society has filtered into the sociological study of religion, the New Age has come to be seen as exemplary of the marketization of the religious field (see the discussion of Lyon and Roof in Chapter Two, and Redden, 2005). Considerations of issues of social power in markets are, however, mostly

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absent in such discussions. Rather than being arrays of choice, markets involve proliferations of authorities, one potential consequence of which is individualization as different individuals become involved with different authorities. This is precisely the situation in nonformative regions of the religious field, where authorities do not shape in any formative manner the identities or lifestyles of participants. The issue of motivation must therefore be considered, for such nonformativeness leads to the question of why participants continue to be involved with these authorities. In other areas of the field, this is explained in part by the very shaping of the self in a formative manner such that individuals feel themselves to have a natural connection to what they see as their choices, which may be interpreted in terms of Bourdieu’s view of the fit between the habitus and the objective conditions of the field. The peculiarity of motivation in nonformative regions of the religious field is that people wish to remain involved with religious authorities (in other words, it is important for them to remain religious) but not in any formative manner. They are therefore motivated to become involved with diverse religious authorities, but with no religious habitus shaping their choices towards some and away from others. There is, though, a tendency to avoid those authorities in which involvement is structured in a formative manner. Hence, whilst there is some engagement with spiritualist, Theosophical and pagan traditions, there is very little with Christian churches. This also explains why social interactions tend to take the form of networks rather than merely dissipating, since it is only through networking (and specifically not through the formation of movements or formal groups) that people are enabled to become involved with a diversity of such religious authorities. The question now becomes why these people are motivated to continue to be involved with diverse but nonformative religious authorities. As shown repeatedly in the ethnographic chapters, the vast majority in the Nottinghamshire network had been brought up as churchgoers or become involved with religious organizations in adolescence. The way people talked about these experiences suggests they were formative, not least because they marked the starting-point of autobiographical narratives. These experiences were represented as important, rather than articulating a sense of nominal or disillusioned religiousness. Narratives progressed to show how these experiences became marked by contestations with the formative nature of authority, arising in most cases from other experiences such as with alternative religious traditions. Rather than leading to the cessation of religious practice altogether, this instead led to people moving on from their traditions and becoming involved episodically with a number of other formative traditions (especially spiritualism) before rejecting these for the same reason and becoming involved with networks in which nonformative authorities proliferated. Nonformative regions of the religious field are therefore not predicated upon the disappearance of religious authority but its relativization, a situation that must be related to social changes in that field and, concomitantly, to participants’ ambiguous attitudes to authority. Those in nonformative regions of the religious field can be said to have experienced a degree of personal secularization, in which formative religious authorities became significantly weakened in their lives but without leading to a loss of religiousness altogether.1 Here, I am using the term ‘secularization’ in its general sense of the decline of religious authority, rather than in its more restricted sense

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of the disappearance of religion. This weakening must be set within the broader context of processes of secularization in Euro-American societies that have seen not only decline in church attendance (at least in Europe) but also in specific beliefs and practices (Bruce, 2002, pp. 45–74, 140–50, 204–28).2 Whilst many Euro-Americans undoubtedly have ceased to participate meaningfully in the religious field, others have ceased to participate in religious traditions but by remaining religious come to occupy nonformative regions of the field. These latter, such as those in the Nottinghamshire network, continue to feel, and identify as, religious (or, sometimes, spiritual), but without a specific religious identity. This does not mean, however, that these people are confused or lacking in morals, as many sociologists (and other social commentators) claim. In addition, it is not the case that authorities and discourses in nonformative regions are relativized in the manner described in postmodernist theories, which tend not only to view relativization as part of a universal trend but also in relation to the rise of self-authority (for example, Featherstone, 1991, pp. 122–8; Hunt, 2004, pp. 23–4).3 In contrast, the relativization of authorities that I have described is limited to nonformative regions of the religious field and thus exists in a wider context of formative (or unrelativized) authorities, even if these latter are increasingly contested in new ways, especially, but not entirely, through processes of secularization. To interpret the sorts of social phenomena that I researched as indicative of a general postmodern process of the relativization of authorities and discourses detaches them from their social context of the wider religious field and its plethora of orthodox and unorthodox formative authorities. In other words, I argue that whilst processes of marketization, pluralization and fragmentation have undoubtedly affected the religious field in recent decades, they have not done so in the wholesale manner described by many theorists, who assume a monumental reconfiguration. These theorists not only largely eschew historical continuities, but also tend to enforce macro-social theories of radical social change without sufficient contextualized study. I now further broaden my interpretation of nonformativeness by relating the centrality of practices of spirit possession to the class identities of those in the Nottinghamshire network, thus enabling comparative remarks on other religious phenomena. Possession and class Interpreting possession In Chapter Three I explained my reasons for viewing religion as a field of conflict over the capital of relations to personified supernatural entities. Chapter Five then highlighted the centrality of practices of spirit possession in the Nottinghamshire network, by considering the role of the channelling workshops organized by the Spencers and the involvement of participants at the meditation group (in the past and contemporaneously) in groups centred on such practices. These themes were carried through subsequent chapters, with Chapter Six also demonstrating the prevalence of healing practices (such as Reiki and crystal healing) that involved forming a connection with supernatural powers, and Chapter Seven illustrating the centrality

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of possession to those religious traditions peripheral to the network. Throughout this ethnographic account I have explored the ambiguous relationship of participants in the network to social authorities managing access to these entities. In contrast to possession careers described in anthropological literature, possession in the network did not follow a particular route, however contested. Nor did possession occur in a wider context of conflict concerning orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, or of competition between the possessed. The characteristics of possession practices in the network therefore resulted from its nonformativeness, in other words from its existence in regions of the religious field bereft of conflict over religious capital. The discussion in the previous section explains why possession, as religious capital, remained central in the Nottinghamshire network. Although people had experienced a degree of personal secularization, they still participated meaningfully in the religious field and thus sought relationships to supernatural entities in order to give their practices and lives religious meaning. However, unlike in formative religious traditions where these relationships are regularly ritualized and assured by authorized figures such as priests, no such conditions existed in the network. Ritualization in the network that articulated such relationships, as in the meditation group and channelling workshops, did so through a context in which ritual leaders lacked formative authority. In other words, the religious legitimation provided by access to capital in the form of relationships to supernatural entities was neither assured nor authorized in the network. This meant that to imbue their practices with religious meaning, people in the network sought periodic involvement with overt religious authorities, in other words with individuals and traditions maintaining explicit relationships with supernatural beings. It is for this reason that possession practices were central to their lives and to the network in general: for many, this was achieved through contact with channellers or shamans, but for others through contact with the possessed in peripheral religious traditions, most notably spiritualism. Sometimes this led to people becoming possessed, as in the case of Christine. Within this may be included practices in which healing energies were channelled, especially if these had been legitimated or taught by the possessed, as was the case with Reiki healing for Sally, Noel and Beth. Given the nonformative context of their practices, people’s connections with these authorities remained episodic and partial, legitimating their practices as religious without establishing an enduring, taken-forgranted legitimation. I wish to broaden this argument by showing how the centrality of possession did not only result from this legitimating role in nonformative contexts, but also articulated an ambiguous relationship to authority indicative of status ambiguity. In Chapter Five, I briefly discussed Lewis’s comparative study of possession, but his central argument concerns an epidemiological enquiry into who becomes possessed and why. Lewis (2003, pp. 26–8) contends that in cases where the possessing spirits or powers are marginal or alien to a society’s cosmology, which he calls ‘peripheral possession’, the majority involve women, with possession acting as an ‘effective vehicle’ of ‘mystical attack’ to ‘protect’ women lacking other means to advance their aims against the male ‘dominant sex’; it is thus an ‘oblique aggressive strategy’ in the universal ‘sex-war’. Lewis therefore links his theory to other status deprivation theories common in functionalist accounts of religion (see Wilson, 1975, pp. 3–4).

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Lewis’s theory, however, has been criticized for unduly neglecting the agency of the possessed (especially by other ethnographers of Sudanese zar possession, such as Boddy, 2002 and Constantinides, 1985) and even of the possessing spirits (Keller, 2002, pp. 35–7).4 In her review of relevant literature, Boddy (1994, pp. 415–19) asks to whom women are peripheral, for not only does much female possession relate to domestic spheres of action for which women bear responsibility, but it also often occurs in contexts of cultural resistance to deep social changes caused by colonialism, nationalism or global transformation (see also Atkinson, 1992, pp. 314–19). Against this view, Lewis (2003, p. xi) defends his claim that female possession occurs in contexts of gender oppression, yet what seems to be at issue in these debates is the documentation of shifting opportunities rather than determinism or freedom (or, in sociological terms, structure or agency). The peculiarity of possession, at least in its peripheral forms where it is not practised within orthodox religion, is therefore the way it addresses status ambiguity rather than deprivation, although such ambiguity may involve (subjectively or objectively) the loss of a previous status. Many of the cases considered by Boddy (1994, p. 422) involve shifts by women from domestic to political roles, and thus shifts in the possibilities for their actions: she claims that possession creatively relocates individuals in an alienating or confusing world through a process of healing and self-construction. This ambiguity is implicit within Boddy’s (2002, p. 414; my emphasis) assessment of those Sudanese possessed women she researched, each of whom ‘is now given occasion to achieve a degree of detachment from the gender constructs that have so completely shaped her being, thus to establish a basis for the negotiation of her subordination’. In other contexts, as Skultans’s (1974) study of spiritualism in a Welsh town also shows, female possession may reinforce gender roles by transforming them into ones more acceptable to the women involved, ritually reconciling husbands and wives, thus addressing status ambiguity. Similarly, Stoller (1989, p. 268) finds that the history of possession amongst the Songhay of Niger is associated with social change, including Islamization, French colonialism and post-colonialism: ‘When confronted with powerful and influential others, the Songhay have resisted those “realities” that have threatened to vitiate their cultural identity by incorporating them into the symbolic framework of their possession rituals.’ Whilst Nabokov’s (2000) analysis of Tamil female possession as acting against the self takes the view that possession does not always involve such negotiation, her ethnography too can be reinterpreted in terms of the correspondence between possession and status ambiguity, for she underemphasizes the process of self-construction whereby the possessed come to adopt their domestic roles and, in many cases, their role within possession cults. Possession may therefore involve status ambiguity associated with social change (as also in popular religions) or quotidian biographies (such as, in Lewis’s cases, women whose husbands take on new wives, or effeminate men). The possessed become involved in an ambiguous heightened and immediate personal relationship to supernatural entities, which empowers through the distinction of being chosen for possession, but also disempowers through becoming subordinate to the possessor’s aims and wishes. Possession therefore corresponds strongly to status ambiguity, but this should not be taken solely as an argument about identity for status involves relationships to social authority. In other words, status ambiguity

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and its correspondence to possession practices in the religious field are to do with relationships of social power. Indeed, this correspondence can be understood in terms of changes in the field of power that have homologous effects in the religious and other fields, although these changes do not fully explain the situation in these fields since each remains semi-autonomous as a result of its own history. Since it was precisely status ambiguity that marked the class locations of many in the Nottinghamshire network, a deeper understanding of the homology between the field of power and the religious field, including changes in the latter that pertain to secularization, may be explored. Class and neoliberalism As is common in ethnographic research, an important unanticipated theme arose that became central for interpreting my object of study. Initially concentrating upon an understanding of religious authority and organization, my attention was drawn to widespread and frequent comments and discussions on workplace authority. I have mentioned this at times in the ethnographic chapters, such as in my discussions of the Lovells, Spencers and Michael, but this was a much more prevalent topic than those remarks indicate. In addition, the way this topic was talked about was very similar to discussions in the network about attitudes and relationships to religious authority, a similarity people sometimes explicitly addressed. My noticing this topic was one reason that I began to delve more specifically into people’s life histories, rather than just their religious histories, in order to trace the complex ways in which experiences of, and attitudes towards, various forms of authority were interwoven in their lives.5 In this manner, I started to make links with the significance of possession practices in people’s histories as I became increasingly aware of the centrality of possession in the groups I was studying. By interpreting this data in a way that makes sense of people’s lives in terms of wider social changes, which is the aim of this chapter, I am not claiming that those I studied would necessarily recognize themselves in the picture I draw of them, but nor do I think they would see something completely alien. Although I did not talk about my more developed thoughts on this issue with them, as some sociologists taking a particular reflexive line promote (see Mauthner and Doucet, 2003), in the second phase of my fieldwork I occasionally and informally raised the seeming correspondence between ambiguous attitudes to religious and other authorities. Most readily admitted that, in general, they did not want to be ‘tied to what others say I must do’, as Christine put it. My interpretation, then, is one that arises from the data itself as much as it is informed by social theory. In the hierarchical terminology of sociological thought, I am trying to raise the former up to a more general level as I bring the latter down to a more specific one. In this way, I aim to avoid the fallacies of New Age studies that tend to adopt a general theory that is merely placed on to poorly contextualized data. In addition, I make no apologies for theorizing upon the basis of empirical research into a relatively small-scale social network and 14 key informants. Only by such a method can detailed, socially contextualized data be gained, which is, as I have repeatedly stressed, overwhelmingly lacking in scholarly studies of these religious practices. By eschewing the quantitative breadth that some

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scholars have sought to achieve through surveys, and the qualitative breadth that others have sought through scattered and episodic fieldwork, my narrow but persistent ethnographic focus may reveal important issues that are otherwise overlooked. My argument is that the people I studied tended to experience a relatively high degree of status ambiguity in terms of their class positions, an ambiguity corresponding to practices of possession. This status ambiguity can be linked to shifts in Euro-American class structures, whereby certain fractions of the workingclass in recent decades have experienced greater education, opportunities and professionalization similar to that enjoyed by the middle-class, but only alongside the continued insecurities and indistinctions common to the working-class. This is experienced primarily in workplace relationships, where expectations of being able to exercise authority remain unfulfilled or frustrated. Given widespread personal secularization, whereby the personal significance of religion has collapsed, for many Euro-Americans this situation will bear little correspondence to religious practice. But for the religious, this situation corresponds to religious practice, especially through the enhanced significance of possession. In the next section, I will consider resurgent possession practices amongst those affected by little personal secularization, but here I will continue focusing upon the religious practices of those whose relative degree of personal secularization means they now occupy nonformative regions of the religious field. For these people, the significance of possession lies not only in its legitimating role within these regions, but also in the practical manner by which it addresses status ambiguity, as anthropological literature on possession has indicated. Indeed, those involved in these nonformative regions seem more likely to be from class fractions experiencing status ambiguity, since the very processes of education, mobility and professionalization are likely to lead to ambiguous relationships with religious authorities and thus to re-positionings from formative to nonformative regions of the religious field. This interpretation, then, is not one that posits a cause-and-effect relationship between the material and cultural aspects of people’s lives, such as between work and religion, but which situates religious experience in a homologous relationship to other experiences. However, this homology is itself situated in the wider field of power of class relationships, and it is in this sense that the social changes associated with neoliberalism are central to my interpretation. I will now address the growth of professionalized fractions of the working-class and the class positions of those in the Nottinghamshire and similar networks, before turning to social theory of neoliberal societies. Following this, I will explore the situation in other neoliberal societies and amongst Euro-Americans who have not experienced personal secularization, where practices of possession of a formative nature are increasingly prevalent. Class distinctions Although, as noted in Chapter Two, the New Age has tended to be seen as a middle-class phenomenon, this has been questioned by empirical studies. British surveys by Rose (1998, pp. 10–11) and Corrywright (2003, pp. 127–37) of people involved with the sorts of practices found in the Nottinghamshire network show that whilst respondents tended to hold white-collar occupations and to have received higher than average education, there were few clear indicators of firm

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middle-class status. Despite Rose’s (ibid.) claims of the middle-class status of his respondents, for example, few or none practised traditional middle-class professions such as law or medicine. The difficulties associated with standard occupational class schemes, such as Rose employs, in terms of their overriding concern simply with the distinction between blue-collar and white-collar occupations, has received much attention by sociologists (Edgell, 1993, p. 43). By downplaying heterogeneity amongst white-collar workers, the general field of New Age studies has tended to replicate the misinterpretation of much sociological thinking regarding Euro-American class statuses, whereby the boundaries of the middle-class are hugely inflated. Relatively high levels of education and managerial or service sector employment should not, however, be equated with the middle-class, because this misinterprets the status of much of that employment. The emergence of the middle-class involves, on the one hand, the appropriation of education and other forms of capital increasingly associated with the welfare state, and, on the other hand, the connection of these to the growth of spheres of management and professionalization in business and the state, especially in relation to bureaucratized social structures (Perkin, 1969, pp. 252–61; Savage, 2000, pp. 129–32; Weber, 1948, p. 241). Whilst this has always involved ambiguous relationships with other classes (Woodiwiss, 1998, p. 41), in Euro-American societies it has been achieved clearly enough to endow the middle-class with a significant degree of distinction and security. In other words, following classical sociological interpretations that Bourdieu (1984) has most recently been foremost in stressing, class status should be understood in a relational not essential manner. Middle-class status does not depend upon the monopoly of educational achievement itself, or of managerial or service sector roles themselves, but upon the maintenance of distinction, including in education and employment, from other classes. From this perspective, the significant growth in higher education, and managerial and service sector employment in Euro-American societies since the 1970s does not represent the expansion of the middle-classes or the emergence of societies in which all (or nearly all) are middle-class (discussed in Edgell, 1993, pp. 119–20). These ideas lie behind views about classless societies and tend to be coupled with theories purporting the shift from producer to consumer societies, where mass participation in consumption (including of the mass media) has resulted in the steady effacement of distinctions (discussed in Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2001, pp. 876–7). In contrast, the relational view of class, which is consonant with the theoretical approach to power I explored at the start of Chapter Three, diverts our attention to people’s experiences at work and other areas of life, and thus to relationships of social power. Looked at from this viewpoint, it seems clear that recent social changes have involved the inclusion of working-class fractions without the attainment of middleclass status.6 Educational capital, for example, loses much of its status when it is distributed amongst greater numbers of people; in addition, the value of such capital varies according to the institution with which it is associated, enabling the middle-class to retain distinction in an expanding sector (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 122, 132–49). Similarly, the growth of managerial and service sector employment reflects capitalist restructuring, particularly of a global nature whereby manufacturing has shifted outside Euro-America, rather than an expansion of middle-class jobs. This

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is supported by the fact that much of this new employment lacks the securities and distinctions of middle-class jobs, as shown by ambiguities regarding authority, autonomy, perks, pensions and other benefits schemes, and by the prevalence of labour casualization (Edwards, 2005). Paradoxically, such developments have occurred alongside job professionalization, whereby managerial and service sector jobs at all levels involve practical discourses concerning careers, training and responsibilities (Savage, 2000, pp. 139–46). These considerations show that empirical New Age studies do not demonstrate the involvement of the middle-class. It may be that those involved are primarily from what has been described as the new middle-class or petit bourgeoisie (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 354–65; Edgell, 1993, pp. 66–73; Skeggs, 2004, pp. 141–7), or more simply the lower middle-class. This matches Bourdieu’s (1984, pp. 365–71) identification of religious and leisure countercultural tastes, and the involvement with therapeutic authorities that moralize through analysis, but over-emphasizes the ‘exaltation of the self’ and the extent to which ‘fun’ and ‘pleasure’ replace ‘work’ and ‘duty’. Instead, those involved are more accurately described as the professionalized fractions of the working-class who, through the growth of higher education and the managerial and service sectors, have been able to gain forms of capital, move into forms of employment, and develop certain tastes not traditionally associated with their class. But it is the continuing status distinction from other classes that marks their own working-class status, particularly experiences regarding the lack of opportunity to exercise authority and autonomy in the workplace. To return to the Nottinghamshire network, it was these experiences that were highlighted in people’s remarks and discussions about work, arising spontaneously and frequently in connection with a wide range of topics, especially religious ones. Class in the Nottinghamshire network Features corresponding to the experiences and distinctions of the professionalized working-class were found throughout the Nottinghamshire network. This included religious discourses that tended to be erudite, exemplified in channellers’ speech, such as by drawing explicitly upon historical knowledge. This was also evident in ordinary speech, but here was complemented by conversation about the lack of authority in workplace roles. There was much talk about the drudgery of work, especially as those in higher positions were seen as undermining any expected autonomy. Contrary to assumed theories about the New Age there was little articulated sense of self-achievement or the ability for people to express themselves in their jobs. Even the self-worth at work expressed by Chris and Michael was offset by remarks about their dissatisfaction and eventual departure from their jobs. The common scholarly view of New Age practices as self-expressive mistakenly leads to the theory that these practices compensate or provide therapy for the materialism and social order of middle-class employment and lifestyles (Danforth, 1989; Heelas, 1982), or to the theory that they parallel middle-class autonomy (Barker, 1994; Bruce, 1996, p. 218). As shown in previous chapters, not only is this view based upon very little socially contextualized empirical evidence and an unwarranted distinction between self-authority and external authority, it also misinterprets these practices’ discourses for these are concerned not with the self but with relationships to religious authorities. Religious practice in the network

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corresponded instead to the ambiguous relationship to authorities at work, hence to status ambiguity, although not in a therapeutic manner. This also accounts for the prominent role of women in the network, the majority of whom were in similar occupations, in contrast to Heelas and Woodhead’s (2005, pp. 98–107) view that woman are turning to spirituality to express themselves free from constricted social roles. Indeed, professionalized working-class women may experience status ambiguity more keenly since despite vastly enhanced opportunities of education and employment, these remain significantly unfulfilled in terms of salaries, and occupational autonomy and advancement (Joshi, 2005; Skeggs, 1997). This is illustrated by the case of Michelle, whose status as a local magistrate and volunteer manager of a voluntary centre existed alongside her temporary employment contracts for the local authority as a care worker and cook. Michelle’s involvement in the network, including attending the religious fair and organizing shamanistic courses with Michael, therefore represents a shift from her younger involvement and identification with mediums that continued a tradition in her skilled manual-labouring family.7 The ambiguity of her professionalized and aspirational occupational status corresponded to a repositioning to nonformative regions of the religious field that involved ambiguous relationships to religious authorities. These comments do not mean that those in the network held any clear class identity, but suggest that their sense of class identity would be ambiguous, which was in fact the case. Although some, such as the Lovells and the Spencers described themselves or their upbringings as ‘middle-class’, the majority avoided such selfidentifications (in ordinary speech and interviews), just as religious identities were evaded. Their tastes and attitudes could, though, be described as petit bourgeois, as seen not only in their home decorations and where their homes were geographically situated, but also in their descriptions of personal experiences (religious or otherwise) as ‘nice’ or ‘relaxing’, and their discussions about social issues that tended to articulate a distinction from those who lived in council houses, engaged in vandalism, received welfare and did not take responsibility for themselves.8 Such attitudes can, however, be seen as typical of those fractions of the working-class that have aspired, and been afforded the opportunity, to gain a portion of the status and material reward associated with the middle-class, which in the past have tended to be described as the respectable working-class. In this way, they can be equated with those who hold sufficient cultural capital to play with class identities, in a manner that Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst (2001) describe as reflexive and ambivalent. Amongst those in the network, this derived from their ambiguous social status and did not lead, as Payne and Grew (2005) purport, to an internally consistent conception of class identity. This situation marked differences from those peripheral religious traditions, where, at least in the spiritualist and pagan groups, other working-class fractions predominated. Although Alvin participated in the religious fair and held an ambiguous attitude towards spiritualism, his religious practices and identity remained largely within that tradition, as shown in his status with spiritualist organizations and his orthodox training of Irene and Edward. In many ways, his social status was similar to Michelle’s in that he came from a solidly working-class area of Nottinghamshire and was still employed in a low status, low-paid job, but through voluntary work had gained professional qualifications that enabled him to take on roles with a higher

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degree of social status. Similarly, whilst Martin, Marion and Suzi in the occult study group were engaged in further or higher educational courses and, for the latter two, expected to enter professional employment in the service sector, all three were studying as mature students after many years in low status, low-paid jobs. A good many at this group were manual workers, so that Leon and Clare’s distinction as professional social workers was noticeable, expressed in part through the former’s conspicuously learned and confident speech. In contrast to these groups, then, the network was largely comprised of other fractions of the working-class, namely those whose social status was higher but highly ambiguous.9 Neoliberalism and authority The social changes associated with status ambiguity in Euro-American societies must be interpreted within wider social, cultural and economic transformations that shed further light on the nature of authority in the Nottinghamshire network. To a large extent, these transformations relate to the neoliberalization of these societies, particularly Britain and the United States, since the 1970s, with the loosening of state control over capital and the diminishing strength of labour movements.10 Alongside the expansion of education, job professionalization and increased employment opportunities that I have addressed, lay the proliferation of all sorts of authority in market-structured contexts leading to the individualization that I raised in Chapter Three by drawing upon the work of Bourdieu, Skeggs and Rose. From different perspectives, these writers describe how people’s practices and identities are being shaped through involvement with multiple authorities, especially relating to the consumption of lifestyles, such as in dress, healthcare, leisure activities, and so on. In contrast to Bauman (2000) and Giddens (1991), they show how such proliferation and consumption enhances rather than effaces class distinctions. Furthermore, such authorities articulate discourses of entrepreneurialism, professionalization and responsibilization that correspond to those in the job market. These not only emphasize individualization through a discourse of personal achievement, but also through the practical ways in which the proliferation of authorities means that even very similar people become involved with different authorities as a matter of course. Skeggs (2004, p. 139) criticizes ‘theorists of individualization and reflexivity’ for universalizing the ‘proliferation of choice’ amongst all classes, claiming that the working-class are not involved in these developments. But the argument I have pursued in this section attempts to broaden our understanding of the working-class by viewing certain fractions, at least, as having been caught up in these processes of neoliberalization, especially through the expansion of education and job professionalization. This proliferation and individualization is associated with the formative shaping of selves and practices, in other words to the formation of a neoliberalized class habitus across various social fields, so that working-class as well as middle-class individuals bear class distinctions in terms of aspirations, tastes and senses of self.11 This neoliberalization involves new technologies of the self through which people become involved with social authorities, rather than the clearing of social authority to provide space for the expression of individuals’ selves.

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As explained already, people in the Nottinghamshire network were clearly involved with these neoliberal practices and discourses. To reiterate a crucial point once more, whilst the situation in this religious network corresponded to the proliferation of authority in neoliberalized market-structured contexts in general, it does not necessarily follow that authority in the former was formative. Bourdieuian and Foucauldian theoretical insights are essential for drawing out this proliferation of authority in neoliberalizing societies, without which the network (and others like it) cannot be adequately understood. New Age studies have almost wholly overlooked the involvement with multiple religious authorities by those engaged with the sorts of practices found in the network, because they have been preoccupied with interpreting authority in terms of the self rather than in terms of social authority. It is only by recognizing this proliferation that analysis of these religious practices can develop. I have shown, however, that although they enable recognition of this proliferation, these theoretical insights are less useful for exploring subjectification and habitus in the network, namely in a context in which multiple authorities relativized one another.12 This situation was quite different from the proliferation of authority in other social fields that those in the network inhabited, where the absence of this relativization enabled multiple authorities formatively to shape subjectivity and habitus. This network therefore can be interpreted only in part in terms of the wider social changes associated with neoliberalization. These changes have intensified and expanded (particularly throughout the working-class) the marketization of lifestyle, not through a process of detraditionalization (radical or partial) and rise of self-authority, but through the proliferation of authority and consequent individualization.13 Occurring homologously across diverse social fields, including the religious field, this shift in the field of power is experienced through practical discourses of entrepreneurialism, professionalization and responsibilization that shape subjectivity and habitus in concordance with the objective conditions of these fields. The widespread personal secularization experienced in the religious field, however, means that nonformative regions emerge in which conditions enable a proliferation of authority that does not result in such shaping. Those in these regions tend to be professionalized fractions of the working-class experiencing status ambiguity and who are churched but somewhat personally secularized. No longer involved in a formative manner with religious authorities but still seeking religious meaning, they become involved with practices of possession that correspond to this ambiguity. The nonformativeness of their religiosity means that they do not compete over the religious capital that these practices entail, but this capital is accessed in order to legitimate as religious their diverse and individualizing practices. Although the widespread scholarly attention to these practices indicates the pervasiveness of nonformative regions of the religious field in Euro-American societies, status ambiguity and neoliberalization have had other effects elsewhere, as I will now explore. Neoliberalism and formative authorities of possession In this chapter, I have examined the centrality of possession to Euro-Americans in nonformative regions of the religious field experiencing status ambiguity as a

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result of processes of neoliberalization. These processes, however, arguably have had greater effects in terms of rapid social change elsewhere, rendering ambiguous the social statuses of considerable sections of other societies. Many of these have witnessed considerable growth in possession practices, but in the context of formative religious traditions such as indigenous shamanisms and Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. These societies’ differences from Euro-American societies are indicative of less secularization, in public and personal terms. These developments are not fully understood by reference to neoliberalization alone, however, but also relate to other aspects of social change, such as post-colonialism, nation-building and urbanization. Space allows me only to sketch this topic, but it is important to consider even cursorily because it deepens an understanding of the themes I have developed in this chapter and indicates directions for future relevant research. Just as scholars have overlooked the centrality of possession in the sorts of religious phenomena such as found in the Nottinghamshire network, this has also been the case in other religious contexts. It is not going too far, I believe, to assert that there has been a resurgence of practices of possession in many parts of the world, with the spread of Pentecostalism in Latin America, West Africa and South-East Asia occurring alongside the reinvigoration of indigenous shamanistic traditions. In Euro-America and across the former Soviet Union, despite considerable secularization that renders them small-scale in comparison to developments in the former regions, there have also been periodic waves of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity and a steady increase in pagan and magical practices. As Martin (1990, p. 140) remarks, ‘Shamanism and spiritism are nearly everywhere, just below the surface or actually on the surface of contemporary life.’ Although these resurgences are shaped by the specific religious histories of the societies in which they occur, there seems little doubt that they correspond in part to neoliberalization. Processes of privatization, marketization and globalization have fundamentally altered social structures and personal experiences in all of these societies, exemplified in the structural-adjustment policies resulting from national governments’ negotiations with global economic bodies. These have laid conditions for endemic status ambiguity not only amongst the working-class and embattled middle-class, but also amongst large numbers of unwaged workers, especially through the relocation of rural workers to urban areas. This has, of course, broken links between communities and religious traditions, seen most clearly in the decline of Catholicism in Latin America, but the uptake in other traditions is not simply explained by them filling in the gaps. Rather, their resurgence must be interpreted in terms of their specific practices, including rituals and practical discourses. That these involve practices of possession tells us much about the correspondence between status ambiguities and developments in these societies’ religious fields, in the wider context of neoliberal changes to the field of power. In his review of studies of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity, Robbins (2004, p. 126) notes that ‘despite its widely acknowledged importance, detailed study of … ritual is notably scarce in the literature’.14 As he indicates, their appeal is inextricably linked to its religious tenor of establishing a direct relationship to, and communication with, divine powers through ‘ecstatic ritual’ and ‘waiting to see

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what the Spirit will do’ (ibid.). Although Martin’s (1990) seminal study does not address this in detail, his analysis of the inculturation of skills of literacy, numeracy, leadership and public-speaking in Pentecostal practice, and the social capital it provides, demonstrates correspondence with the skills required in contemporary capitalist workplaces. In many of these societies, this side of neoliberalism, namely the entrepreneurialism, self-help and social mobility demanded of workers, has developed alongside another where ‘neoliberal forces have eroded the capacity of liberal democratic states to provide education, health and welfare’, which according to Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (2003, p. 121) are precisely the conditions in which Pentecostalism flourishes. Despite flexibility in organization and authority that allow Pentecostal and charismatic Christian churches to schism and provide considerable scope for lay preachers to set up their own churches, they have strong formative tendencies. In the terms established in the first part of this chapter, empirical studies show unequivocally the presence of structures of legitimation, management of experiences and careers of participation in these churches. These are particularly centred upon relations with the Holy Spirit, through the management by church authorities of speaking in tongues (glossolalia) and its interpretation, and through practical discourses of initial and ongoing conversion.15 This formativeness is shown also in Hunt’s (2004) study of the Alpha course in the United Kingdom, which he sees as an ecumenical manifestation of the charismatic movement that emerged in the 1970s. There is a focus on the Holy Spirit in the course, which involves video presentations and group discussions chaired by church members, culminating in a Holy Spirit weekend in which glossolalia is frequently practised by those members and encouraged in others (ibid., pp. 68, 233–47). Although touted by its proponents as a means for conversion, Hunt shows that the majority of participants are already involved with the churches that run the course (ibid., p. 169). Whilst he sees these as predominately middle-class (ibid, pp. 160–61), the problems associated with occupational categories discussed earlier on in this chapter as regards New Age studies may be applied to his – it seems as if most participants come from the professionalized working-class, with over 53 per cent employed in clerical or administrative roles. Alpha, like Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in Euro-American societies in general (see Coleman, 2000; Hunt, Hamilton and Walter, 1997), therefore corresponds to the status ambiguity of churched and still relatively churchgoing members of this class fraction, rather than churched but no longer churchgoing members such as predominated in the Nottinghamshire network. These studies show that nonformative authority is not associated with charismatic authority or simply with loose social organization, features exhibited by much Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, but by the relativization of authority. Correspondences between this form of Christianity and the sorts of phenomena found in the Nottinghamshire network are therefore not as clear as some scholars contend, such as Heelas’s (2002, p. 370) conception of the ‘HS factor’ where Holy Spirit and Higher Self both indicate self-spirituality. This view is hardly corroborated by description of the role of social authority in this form of Christianity and where at the Holy Spirit weekend, for example, ‘The personality of the Holy Spirit was given particular stress, so were teachings alluding to His constant activity and irresistible “power”. As the Alpha

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manual accompanying the video put it, “He wants to take control”’ (Hunt, 2004, p. 237; my emphases). These Christian developments often have occurred alongside, and in competition with, the resurgence of indigenous forms of possession that similarly correspond to people’s experiences in neoliberalizing societies (see Lehmann, 2001; Meyer, 1999). Confounding scholarly expectations regarding modernization and Christianization, witchcraft practices and accusations are increasingly endemic in many African and East Asian societies, which Geschiere (1999, p. 231) relates to the expectations and indeterminancies engendered by the vicissitudes of the global economy, particularly amongst the lower middle-class. Rapid economic development in South-East Asia and the shift to market capitalism in the former Soviet Union have also been accompanied by the resurgence of healing and magical practices involving traditional shamans and magi. According to Kendall (1996, p. 516; my emphasis), South Koreans in self-employment and small businesses increasingly turn to traditional shamans to propitiate ancestors and deities for their ‘high-risk enterprises at the margins of the Korean economic miracle’, whilst Humphrey (1999, p. 3) claims that ‘in many Siberian cities it is now normal for anyone with a misfortune or a quandary to visit a shaman … These clients, mostly well-educated and till recently instructed in atheism, are now beset with economic disaster and new uncertainties’ (see also Lindquist, 2006). Paganism appears to be a parallel development in Euro-American societies, involving not only those occult and witchcraft traditions discussed in Chapter Seven but also shamanistic traditions, for example those drawing upon Nordic mythology and practice such as seid divination (Lindquist, 1997). The correspondence between neoliberalization and these practices of possession, including similar developments in other societies and religious traditions not considered here such as Islamic Sufism, is a topic that should be receiving much greater sociological attention for an adequate understanding of religion in today’s world. Conclusion In this final chapter, I have pursued two lines of argument that deepen a sociological understanding of the Nottinghamshire network in particular and the religious field in general. Drawing upon issues of social power that are so central to the sociological enterprise, these arguments direct attention to social relations, social authority and social organization. In a critical fashion, they build upon Bourdieuian and Foucauldian approaches to power, particularly in their interpretation of practice, discourse and methodology. The first argument explores the formative–nonformative tension in the religious field and the characteristics of nonformative contexts, where authorities are relativized. This was related to personal secularization, involving the unchurching of churched Euro-Americans but without their disappearance from the religious field. Following on from this argument, the second examines the centrality of possession practices in nonformative contexts, which not only enables the legitimation (in a nonformative fashion) of people’s lives and practices as religious, but also corresponds to the status ambiguity that arises from their particular class positions in the professionalized fraction of the working-class. Nonformative regions of the

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religious field in Euro-American societies, and the centrality of possession in these, were interpreted in terms of processes of neoliberalization, but in other societies that have not experienced such personal secularization these processes corresponded to the resurgence of formative contexts of possession, such as Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity and indigenous shamanisms. From these considerations, some implications for sociological research can be drawn out. My discussion of nonformative contexts relates primarily to personal secularization and only secondarily to the proliferation of authority in neoliberal contexts, since proliferation does not in itself entail the relativization of authority that is characteristic of those contexts. However, the concept of nonformativeness may still be useful for investigating religious organizations in which formative authority predominates, and other social fields. In exercising formal control over their social structures and members, religious organizations (such as churches, denominations, sects and cults) present relatively transparent models of social power involving clearly defined authorities, identities and practical discourses. In adopting these models for their own interpretation, sociologists may overlook pockets of nonformativeness in these groups, not where authority is contested (as is the case in any formative context) but where it is relativized. This may involve participants who are involved with diverse other religious authorities, but who maintain silence about this in order to continue to be accepted in the organization. Given the formative–nonformative tension in the religious field, nonformativeness may also be a useful concept for investigating social fields in general. Inhabitants of any particular field cannot simply be assumed to be fully subjectified or to possess a particular habitus, and thus to engage with the game of the field in terms of competing for its capital, in other words to have been shaped in a formative manner. Certain social conditions such as secularization, which themselves require identification and investigation, may lead to the loss of formativeness and the formation of nonformative regions in the field. These conditions should not be seen simply as relating to the contemporary world; in particular, as already stated, the relativization of multiple authorities is not indicative of postmodernization. Nonformative authority should therefore be seen as a concept that can interpret historically and geographically disparate societies, perhaps aiding a more comprehensive sociological understanding of the human condition. Clearly, these are difficult topics to investigate, since nonformative regions of organizations and fields are not identifiable in terms of social identities and movements. One solution is to pay attention to the diverse phenomena that formative authorities categorize and label. Whilst some such categorizations undoubtedly accurately apply to identifiable phenomena (such as Christian churches’ attention to paganism and spiritualism), others could lead scholars to nonformative regions, as was the case with my original interest in the New Age. Thus, in their discussions of the New Age many Euro-American authorities pointed to the existence of a range of phenomena, even as they (and scholars who followed them) misinterpreted these. In order to decide these matters, the only scholarly recourse is to research methods that examine such phenomena in their immediate social contexts, that is, to focus upon issues of power. For scholars of religion, this means not only looking at religious experiences and identities, but also people’s wider life histories and experiences,

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and the social contexts in which these are situated. This brings the issue of social contextualization to the fore once more, for it is only through this that sociological research can proceed adequately. I end on this note, then, calling for a renewed commitment to a scholarly habitus that continually disposes sociologists’ perceptions and practices towards the social contextualization of that which we study. Notes 1 My concept of ‘personal secularization’ may, of course, be compared to Dobbelaere’s (1999, pp. 236–43) individual or micro level of secularization. However, I do not follow his functionalist view that the loss of religious authority in personal life arises from processes of individualization or privatization, because this assumes that such authority can be effective only in communal settings. 2 Although this is not the place to engage in detail with secularization theories and their distinctions between religious privatization and functional differentiation, or their more recent assertions of the public role of religion (see Chapter Two), the manner in which religious authority in personal life has declined in Euro-American societies has been well documented, not least in Brown’s (2001) analysis of the loss of Christian references in British everyday discourses and self-conceptions. 3 Paradoxically, such theories argue, this relativization can lead to the formation of protected enclaves characteristic of fundamentalism (see Bauman, 1998, pp. 72–5). 4 Wilson (1967) makes the further criticism that Lewis universalizes contemporary Euro-American views of gender inequality, a view that Lewis (2003, p. 67) has stoutly contested. 5 The importance of ‘forms of telling’ for exploring class identity is discussed by Skeggs (2004, p. 124). 6 On the growth of simultaneous social inclusion and exclusion in Euro-American societies, see Young (1999, pp. 81–8). 7 For a fuller discussion, see Wood (2004, pp. 191–9). 8 Compare with some of the attitudes of the lower fractions of the petit bourgeoisie discussed by Bourdieu (1984, especially p. 347). 9 These class distinctions should, however, be taken tentatively: Martin (1970, p. 147) points to the ‘unobtrusive artisans and minor clerks’ at a spiritualist church and Hutton (1999, p. 401) to the ‘upper levels of the working class and the lower levels of the middle one’ in British witchcraft. As with Pentecostal involvement explored further on in this chapter, the lesser involvement with nonformative authorities by these spiritualists and pagans may result from their relative lack of personal secularization in comparison to those towards the core of the Nottinghamshire network, rather than from a lower degree of status ambiguity. 10 These changes have received widespread sociological discussion, but attention may particularly be drawn to Harvey (1990) on post-Fordism, Beck (2000) and Mittelman (1996) on globalization, Rose (1999b, pp. 137–42) on advanced liberalism, and Young (1999, pp. 50–51) on social exclusion. I prefer the term ‘neoliberalization’ because it avoids Rose’s implicit evolutionism and Harvey’s assumptions about the replacement of one form of society for another. 11 On the ‘inter-meshing’ of individualized and class identities, see Savage (2000, p. 108). 12 Heelas’s (1987; 1991; 1992) earlier studies of self-religions point to neoliberal technologies and discourses of the self, but these are located in religious movements of

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a formative nature, such as est and Exegesis, rather than phenomena such as found in the Nottinghamshire network. 13 In making these assertions only after a thorough consideration of fieldwork, I aim to avoid the compromise of ethnographic reflexivity that results from determining the contexts of the beliefs and practices of those studied (Englund and Leach, 2000), a criticism that I have repeatedly applied to New Age studies in terms of their lack of social contextualization. 14 As Robbins and other scholars explain, Pentecostalism has changed in the past few decades into a neo-Pentecostal form roughly identical to the charismatic movement. 15 See, for example, Lehmann (1996, pp. 132, pp. 140–42) on the role of obreiros in Latin American churches and Garma Navarro (1998) on Pentecostal socialization.

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Index

Age of Aquarius 19 agency, the self as 18, 62, 65 Alpha course, formativeness 174 anthropology, models 50 Anthroposophical group 5, 7, 13, 137, 142–4, 150, 155 Anthroposophical Society 142 Anthroposophy 6, 86, 87 Arcane School 23 aromatherapy 123, 131, 132 Ascended Masters 2, 91, 95 communication with 3 messages from 102–4, 106–7 audience response 104–6, 108–9 Ashtar 102–4, 105, 106, 113, 117 astrology 132, 145, 147, 148 authority 9 channellers 3, 109–10 channelling workshops 108 contested, religious field 72–4 healers 129 meditation group 85–6, 92–4, 98 and neoliberalism 171–2 at Nottinghamshire fair 121–5 and possession 117–18 relativization 158, 163 spiritualism 138 spiritualist healing 139–42 workplace 166 see also leadership Bach flower essences 88, 123, 133 Bailey, Alice 23 Beck, Ulrich 52 Bell, Catherine, on ritual 68–9 Bellah, Robert Habits of the Heart (co-author) 31 on religious evolution 36–7 Besecke, Kelly 72–3 on US spirituality 30–31 Bhagavad Gita 132 biorhythms 88, 89–90

Bloom, William 16, 19, 47 the body and power 44, 56 subjective experiences 50 body symbolism 50 Bourdieu, Pierre 10, 12, 41 habitus concept 54–6 on power 43–4 on the religious field 65–75 on Weber 66 Bruce, Steve, on New Age spirituality 29–30 Caddy, Eileen 89 capital educational 168 forms of 56–7 religious 66, 116, 118 channellers 2, 4 authority 3, 109–10 criticism of 112–13 nonformativeness 114, 118 presentation methods 111 channelling 2, 3, 10, 12, 91–2, 128 eclecticism 110, 111 effects, case study 111–15 meaning 101 and New Age 101 and play 101, 109 and self-authority 111 as self-expression 110–11 channelling workshops 5, 102–19 audience response 104–6, 108–9 authority 108 links to Christianity 110 to paganism 110 practice 102–3, 106–9 charisma, routinization of 159 clairvoyance 122, 139, 140 class 166–71 and New Age 26, 167–9 Nottinghamshire network 11, 117,

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169–71 and status ambiguity 167 communitas, New Age 25–6, 49 community, and religion 31 consumerism, New Age as 30, 161–2 Cooke, Grace 87 cosmologists, Nottinghamshire fair 123 covens 144–5 Crowley, Aleister 6, 149, 151 Ordo Templi Orientis 148 crystal healing 6, 7, 123, 127, 136 ‘cultural turn’, social sciences 28 Davie, Grace on the sacred 33–4 Deleuze, Gilles 45 Derbyshire fair 5, 6, 142 The Divine Plan for Earth 107 Douglas, Mary 50 dowsing 90 druidry 144 Durkheim, Emile 50 eclecticism, channelling 110, 111 Eddy, Mary Baker 86 emic concept, New Age as 16, 23, 24 Essenes 4, 92, 94, 97 books about 80, 87 lifestyle 89 Reiki healing 132 teachings 87–8, 156 theology 84, 85 est 18, 20 etic concept, New Age as 16, 23, 24 Euro-America 12 meaning 13n1 neoliberalization 11 nonformativeness 11 paganism 175 psychology, preoccupation with 18–19 secularization 163 witchcraft 144 Europe, religion in 32–4 Exegesis 18 feng shui 123 Ferguson, Marilyn 22 fields

as class relations 57–8 criticisms of 59–60 definition 56 power 44, 56 see also religious field Findhorn community 8, 16, 23, 24, 26, 37, 50, 60, 88 firewalking 48 folk models, New Age studies 48, 49, 72 ‘Footprints’ poem 89, 92–3 formativeness Alpha course 174 careers of participation 158 legitimation structures 158 management of experiences 158 see also nonformativeness Foucault, Michel 10, 12, 41 genealogical method 16, 24, 51 on governmentality 51 on power 44, 46, 50–51 subjectivication 50–51, 155, 157 Fountain Light groups 91 freedom nature of 53 Rose on 53 Friends of the Earth 149 fundamentalism 28, 34 see also neofundamentalism Gardner, Gerald 144 genealogy, of New Age 16, 24, 50 Gerlach, Luther 22 Giddens, Anthony 45, 52 on the self 63–5 Glastonbury community 16, 25–6, 27 and mainstream society 26 Glastonbury Festival 121 globalization meaning 35 and New Age 35–6 gossip as social capital 98 value 48 governmentality Foucault on 51 writings, criticisms 53–4 Great White Brotherhood 87 Guattari, Félix 45 Gurdjieff 7, 137

Index Habermas, Jürgen 45 habitus 11, 54–6, 155, 162 definition 55 diversity 55 and identity 160 Hamilton, Malcolm 125 Hardinge-Britten, Emma 138 Hare Krishna movement 26 Hay, Louise L. 15, 19, 47 healers authority 129 Nottinghamshire fair 122–3, 129–36 see also Reiki healing Heelas, Paul 30, 61–2 on self-spirituality 18–22 The New Age Movement 47, 62 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, on the sacred 32–3 Hilarion, Master 106 Hine, Virginia 22 Hundredth Monkeying! 7, 114 Hutterites 26 Icke, David 6, 91, 152 identity and habitus 160 and paganism 146 social 160 individualization 31, 32, 51, 63, 64 International Biogenic Society 88 International Society for Krishna Consciousness 132, 133 Islam neofundamentalist 35–6 pendulum swing theory 159 Jenkins, Palden, The Only Planet of Choice 114 Kabbalah Correspondences 147–8 Kabbalah study group 149, 151 Kendal, religion in 21–2, 47 Kerista 19, 47 key thinkers, New Age studies 18–28 Kuan Yin, Master 112, 113 leaders, meditation group, life history 86–93 leadership, meditation group 85–6, 97–8 see also authority

199

legitimation Nottinghamshire fair 124, 125 structures 158 life histories 86–93, 125–9, 131–4, 140–42 comparisons 92–3 value of 86 light, in meditation 80, 81, 83–4, 85 London, Mind-Body-Spirit Festival 6, 106, 121, 125, 130 Lucis Trust 24 Luckmann, Thomas, The Invisible Religion 29 Luhmann, Niklas 45 Lukes, Steven on power 41–2, 44 Power: A Radical View 41 Lyon, David 34, 35 McGuire, Meredith B. 129 MacLaine, Shirley 16 magick group 150–52 mainstream society, and Glastonbury community 26 Major, John 17 Manning, Matthew 124, 142 Maslow, Abraham 148 meditation light in 80, 81, 83–4, 85 visualization 81, 84–5, 95 Zen 94 meditation group 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 79–99 authority 85–6, 92–4, 98 commonality 95–7 leaders, life history 86–93 leadership 85–6, 97–8 meditation postures 81, 94 themes 83–5 and nonformativeness 79 practice 79–82 ritualization 93–5 socializing 82–3, 96–7 mediumship 116, 138 trance 141 Michael, Archangel 106 Mind-Body-Spirit Festival, London 6, 106, 121, 125, 130 Minson, Jeff, on power 42–3 modernity

Possession, Power and the New Age

200 and the New Age 20–21 and the sacred 33 see also postmodernity

National Federation of Spritualist Healers 124, 138 neofundamentalism, Islam 35–6 neoliberalism 35, 171–5 and authority 171–2 neoliberalization, Euro-America 11 network of networks 22–3 and postmodernity 23 networking, Nottinghamshire fair 128 networks network of 22–3 nonformative 159 New Age and channelling 101 Christian critiques 16–17 and class 26, 167–9 communitas 25, 25–6, 49 social organization 26 consensus views 26–7 as consumerism 30, 161–2 critical discourses 17, 70 as emic concept 16, 23, 24 as etic concept 16, 23, 24 firewalking 48 genealogical approach of 16, 24, 50 and globalization 35–6 heterogeneity 35, 70–71 hostility to 17 as marketing term 161 marketplace 125 meanings 2–3, 9, 15–16, 19, 160 as emblem of apocalypticism 24 as idiom of self-realization 24 and modernity 20–21 music 17 origins 19 paganism, distinction 27 phenomena, nonformativeness 71 postmodernity, response to 34–5 publications 17 self-authority 2–3, 20, 27, 36, 38, 60–63, 70, 155 as self-selection 23, 37 as self-spirituality 21 shamanism 35

study problems 8 sympathic views 17 taxon 23–5, 48, 50, 97 texts, importance of 24 travellers 16, 17, 26 New Age movement as invisible religion 29 and play 110 self-spirituality 19 New Age spirituality 36 Bruce on 29–30 New Age studies consensus views 26–7 as distinct discipline 9–10 ethnographic approach 8, 12 folk models 48, 49, 72 key thinkers 18–28 methodology, critique 47–50, 125, 166–7 and power 9 problems 8, 12 in sociology of religion 28–30, 37–8 theoretical approaches 9–12 nonformative authorities 4, 162 meaning 10 networks 159 nonformativeness 13, 156–63 channellers 114, 118 concept 157, 176 Euro-America 11 and meditation group 79 New Age phenomena 71 Nottinghamshire network 11 possession 116 Reiki healing 134–5 religious field 70–74, 161, 162 structures, lack of 158 see also formativeness Nottinghamshire, paganism 146–8 Nottinghamshire fair 5, 12–13, 121–36 authority at 121–5 consumer follow up 123 cosmologists 123 founding 125–6 healers 122–3, 129–36 legitimation 124, 125 networking 128 organization 121, 124

Index overview 121–2 producers authority 124–5 purpose 123 spiritualists 122 Nottinghamshire network 4–9 class 11, 117, 169–71 ethnographic approach 8, 12 groups differences 152–3 interconnections 4–6 nonformativeness 11 schematic 5 study methodology 7–9 women 170 see also meditation group; occult study group occult study group 5, 6, 148–52 magick group 150–52 meetings 146–8 participants 148–9 see also paganism occultism, Third Reich 6 Omniology 123, 124 organization informal 152 Nottinghamshire fair 121, 124 social 4, 9, 23, 149, 174, 175 New Age communitas 26 structures 13 SPIN network 23 spiritualism 10, 137, 138 Pagan Federation 145 paganism 19, 22, 23, 27, 110, 136, 144–8 development 144–5 Euro-America 175 and identity 146 New Age, distinction 27 Nottinghamshire 146–8 see also witchcraft pendulum swing theory, Islam 159 Pentecostalism 11, 13, 173–4 play and channelling 101, 109 and New Age movement 110 possession 10, 13, 66, 101, 163–6 and authority 117–18

201

centrality of 13, 115–19, 163–5, 173 female 165 meaning 116 nonformativeness 116 practice of 11, 115–16, 164, 173 and Reiki healing 128, 134–6 and status ambiguity 165–6 postmodern society 23 postmodernity meaning 35 and network of networks 23 New Age, as response to 34–5 see also modernity power approaches to 41–5 and the body 44, 56 Bourdieu on 43–4 concept of 42–3 covert 41–2 ethnographic approach 45 fields theory 44, 56 Foucault on 44, 46, 50–51 interactionist approach 43 Lukes on 41–2, 44 methodology 45–50 Minson on 42–3 and New Age studies 9 Parsons-Mills debate 41 and the self 50–60 social 12 strategy notion 44 theories 41–50 practice channelling workshops 102–3, 106–9 divinatory 10 effects of 51 everyday 73 healing 10 meditation 10 meditation group 79–82 neglect of 47–9, 53–4, 59, 64 of possession 11, 115–16, 164, 173 Reiki healing 130–31, 134–5 spiritualist healing 138–40 varieties of 10 priests 67, 118, 144, 164 Prince, Ruth, The New Age in Glastonbury (co-author) 25, 49 privatization, religion 31, 32 see also the self

202

Possession, Power and the New Age

prophets 67, 118 psychology, role 53, 62 Quakers 22, 132 Rajneesh movement 18 Redfield, James, The Celestine Prophecy 83, 96 reflexivity, and the self 64–5 reflexology 131 Reiki healing 5, 6, 8–9, 121, 123, 130–36 Essenes 132 life histories 131–4 nonformativeness 134–5 origins 130 and other healing 135–6 popularity 130 and possession 128, 134–6 practice 130–31, 134–5 technique 131 relativization, authority 158, 163 religion and community 31 definitions, problems 66–7 in Europe 32–4 evolution, Bellah on 36–7 in Kendal 21–2, 47 popular 158–9 privatization 31, 32 spirituality, ambiguity 36, 39n10, 160 in the US 30–32 see also self-religions; sociology of religion religious field authority, contested 72–4 Bourdieu on 65–75 formative-nonformative tensions 159, 175, 176 formativeness 159 nonformativeness 70–74, 161, 162, 175–6 relationality of 67–8 scope 66 social change 74–5 Riches, David, The New Age in Glastonbury (co-author) 25, 49 Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 62 ritual

Bell on 68–9 nature of 68 and shared experience 69 ritualization, meditation group 93–5 rituals, witchcraft 145 Roddenberry, Gene 91 Roof, Wade Clark 31–2, 191 Rose, Nikolas 54 on freedom 53 Governing the Soul 52 on subjectivity 51–3 Rothstein, Mikael, New Age and Globalization 35 the sacred Davie on 33–4 fragmentation 33 Hervieu-Léger on 32–3 and modernity 33 Sananda, Lord 104, 105, 111–12 Sanders, Alex 144 Scientology 18, 69 secularization models 29–30 personal 162–3, 164, 176, 177n1 theory 28, 34 Sedona community 16, 27 seekers, self-authority 161 seekership 23, 27, 28, 31 models 24 multiple 25 serial 24–5 singular 24 varieties 32 the self 18–19, 37 as agency 18, 62, 65 elevation of 32, 52 formation 60 Giddens on 63–5 and lifestyle consumption 63–4 pluralities of 52, 60 and power 50–60 reflexivity 64–5 sociological understanding 62 see also privatization self-authority 28, 29 and channelling 111 New Age 2–3, 20, 27, 36, 38, 60–63, 70, 155

Index seekers 161 self-expression 57–8 channelling as 110–11 self-religions 61, 177n12 self-selection, New Age as 23, 37 self-spirituality Heelas on 18–22 New Age as 21 shamanism 10, 82, 116, 144, 175 New Age 35 shamans 73, 115, 116, 118, 164, 175 shared experience, and ritual 69 Simes, Amy 149 Sjöö, Monica 17 social change, religious field 74–5 social sciences, ‘cultural turn’ 28 sociology of religion 45 New Age studies 28–30, 37–8 sorcerors 67 Spangler, David 15 SPIN network 22–3, 27, 49 organization 23 spirit possession see possession spiritualism 10, 116, 122, 137–44, 157 authority 138 early years 137–8 organization 10, 137, 138 spiritualist healing 6, 138–40 authority 139–42 circle 5 practice 138–40 rivalry 141–2 technique 139 spiritualists, Nottinghamshire fair 122 Spiritualists’ National Union 138 spirituality 28, 128 characteristics 27 reflexive 32 religion, ambiguity 36, 39n10, 160 in US 30–31 see also see also New Age spirituality Star Trek 91, 108 status ambiguity and class 167 and possession 165–6 Steiner, Rudolf 6, 87, 112, 142 At the Gates of Spiritual Science 143 Stokes, Doris 142

203

subjectification, Foucauldian 11, 50–51, 155, 157 subjectivity 61, 76n11 Rose on 51–3 Sutcliffe, Steven 18, 60 Children of the New Age 23 New Age taxon 23–5, 48, 50, 97 Swami Order 27 Szekely, Edmond, The Teachings of the Essenes 87 Tarot cards 122, 145, 147, 148 taxon, New Age 23–5, 48, 50, 97 Theosophical Society 86, 106, 137, 142 The White Eagle Lodge 87 Third Reich, occultism 6 transcendence, varieties 29, 30, 45 Transcendental Meditation 125 Trevelyan, George 88, 97 Turner, Victor 50 ufology 91, 102, 105, 108 Unit of Service meditation group 23 US, religion in 30–32 visualization 10 meditation 81, 84–5, 95 Weber, Max, Bourdieu on 66 White Eagle 87, 93, 94, 132, 133 White Eagle Lodge 86, 87, 88, 137 The White Eagle Lodge: Purpose and Work 87 witchcraft Euro-America 144 rituals 145 women, Nottinghamshire network 170 Woodhead, Linda 21, 22 Woods, Fr Richard 16 word game 1–2 Wrekin Trust 88 Wuthnow, Robert, Habits of the Heart (co-author) 31 York, Michael network of networks 22–3 The Emerging Network 23 Zen meditation 94